Helsinki Incubators is pleased to announce the selection of 20 teams for NEXUS, its first 6-month in-depth programme held under the City of Helsinki’s Campus Incubators label.
“We were delighted to see over 30 high calibre applications from University of Helsinki researchers, postdocs, PhD students, master’s students, and staff as well as unaffiliated residents of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area” explained Andres Archila, the Project Manager for the NEXUS programme. “The decision wasn’t easy, but after an intense selection process and careful deliberation, and the call to increase the amount of admitted teams due to the impressive quality of applications, we managed to select 20 exceptional teams to take part in the programme.”
Kicking off on September 12th, the Deep Tech, AI & Sustainability-focused mentor-driven NEXUS incubator programme will take place onsite at the University’s Faculty of Science in Kumpula and will consist of weekly expert sessions given in English by professionals in the field.
“A key strength of NEXUS, and a significant benefit to the participating venture teams, is its comprehensive and robust network of mentors coming from the corporate, CVC, and investor worlds,” said Alfonso Gutierrez, Senior Manager of Global Corporate Partnerships at the University. “We have 33 highly accomplished Finnish and international mentors with experience in start-ups and extensive networks. These mentors include professionals from Techstars, Amazon, the Weizmann Institute, ABB, Daimler, Accenture, Reaktor, Telefonica, IBM, Vaisala, WithSecure, Continental, DIMECC, Telia, Neste, Fortum, Wärtsilä, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Porsche, and other corporations, as well as serial entrepreneurs and investors from Finland, Sweden, and Spain. They have all committed to coach the venture teams monthly throughout the programme, and for this we owe them a debt of gratitude.”
You’ll find a summary of all the participating teams below.
1. Sci2Sci
Members: Valerii Kremnev, Angelina Lesnikova
One-click data publishing platform for science
sci2sci is building a one-click data publishing software for researchers. Their product is an electronic lab notebook and a publishing platform in one interface that allows advanced tools for interactive data visualisation and sharing. Their mission is to break barriers in research information publishing and to make research data openly available for reuse and collaboration. Sci2sci was part of the Compass Pre-incubator programme.
2. weSAFE
Members: Pedro Camargo, Hanna Hakulinen, Florian Rathmann, Markku Vainio
WeSAFE develops systems for the rapid and portable detection of chemical agents from air, rivers, lakes, and soil in emergency situations. Their technology enables fast and portable detection at low concentration levels beyond the capabilities of conventional methods that require samples to be sent to a central facility. Moreover, their technology can be tailored to allow the rapid and in-field detection of a variety of substances with applications in forensics, environmental monitoring, and quality control in a variety of industries.
3. reLight
Members: : Pedro Camargo, Florian Rathmann, Leticia Bezerra, Kaline Nascimento
Addressing plastic pollution by focusing on the conversion of plastic waste into H2.
reLight's technology eliminates reliance on fossil fuels and employs only water, sunlight, and earth-abundant materials to generate H2 from plastics. Their approach uses designer photocatalysts displaying improved light absorption and thus better efficiencies relative to competing systems. Moreover, their technology can be adapted to convert other types of solid waste, such as food and biomass, into H2 and other fuels.
Members: Thai Tran Ngoc, Trang Truong, Anh Bui.
Hei.io allows users to translate videos with ease with AI voice-overs allowing for video/ audio dubbing in 70+ languages with 250+ voices. Users can also easily add captions, translated subtitles, translated voice-overs and more. Using AI, their software can automatically transcribe, caption, and voiceover a variety of content into any language, and into any format possible. Their value proposition is to offer a responsive, intuitive, and reliable AI video voiceover system capable of dubbing any language in the world, and also offer AI voiceover language interpreters for online meetings.
5. Ample
Members: Aleksi Nurmi, Sampsa Aerikkala
Ample is building an innovative global media platform that puts scientific expertise as the focal point of communication. Public discussion around current events should not be dictated by fear of disinformation or addictive app design. The platform enables a direct and on-demand channel between the general public and the scientific community to provide reliable comments on news flow. Through a plug-in service tailored to news media, they want to change how people spend their time after reading news articles by allowing the public to read expert answers to the most intriguing questions from the public related to the news story. The core value proposition to its users comes from the improved quality of information in the public discussion.
6. Project VizBiz – Eden accounts
Members: Robert Eden, Jim Solatie, Heidi Vaarala.
A multi-layered business modelling tool for SME’s, Start-ups & New Ventures.
The business world is missing an important tool. Many other disciplines such as product design, architecture, system design, etc. have the benefit of 3-dimensional modelling, but business design currently does not. The team's product combines four interconnected views: The business model view, growth & capacity view, process view, and financial view. This results in a multidimensional visual model of the business that can be twisted and turned like a Rubik’s cube and analysed from multiple angles. In addition, the team is building a SaaS service around the tool which creates a powerful data collecting platform. The data can then be analysed and used for multiple purposes such as a giving benchmark information and design suggestions back to the user, thereby making the business modelling process feel like there was an expert with all the answers sitting next to the user. "You come with a good idea, and you leave with a great business design."
7. Enreport
Members: Dmitriy Novikov, Dmitry Chekhunov, Aliya Shaykhullina
Enreport is building software solutions to decrease energy consumption and CO2 emissions for commercial and industrial companies. It focuses on predictable consumption and prices, digital twin and predictive analytics, and energy demand and supply optimisation. Enreport's aim is to make the energy transition process easier by gamifying the process. Enreport hears a common complaint: "why is it energy transition so complicated, and why should I spend any of my time on energy transition instead of my core business?". That's why Enreport proposes the use of a production process designer and a "phygital" (physical+digital) model of equipment works. Enreport's smart engine learns and looks for patterns in energy consumptions and equipment modes, resulting in an easy to use recommendation system that looks like a combination of Lego and SimCity, which finds the best ways to work and generates tips for selecting equipment and how much load to put on it. Enreport was part of the Compass Pre-incubator programme.
8. NAPA
Members: Juha Kangasluoma, Jesse Haataja, Yusheng Wu
NAPA is creating an affordable condensation particle counter (CPC) measurement device for industry use and with potential applications for other business segments. Nanoparticles deteriorate global air quality and human health, and NAPA is developing low maintenance and easy to use instruments or measurements as service to monitor those nanoparticles.
9. Hyluminium
Members: Lamberto Llagunes Picazo
Green Hydrogen technology with a sustainable and zero emission process.
Hyluminium develops a hydrogen-producing system based on the electrolysis of water through an inorganic reaction through gallium with aluminium through a unified system of phases with very low energy expenditure, taking advantage of the potential and kinetic energy of the fluids or solids involved in the process. Using this system, Hyluminium will be able to produce green hydrogen at a reduced cost with a non-contamination process. The most crucial differentiating element is that it is a zero-emission process with a circular economy process and completely reusable components (Machinery under patent process). Hyluminum is headed by Lamberto, a Mechanical Engineer specialised in Thermal Technology focused on improving his business administration and engineering project management skills. Hyluminum is currently looking for other team members, e.g., product designer, engineer focus in product design, product development.
10. iLuearth
Members: Sunil Singh, Shweta Singh
iLuEarth offers a carbon emission management platform for effective climate action insight and satellite based offset project monitoring. iLuEarth offers a choice for businesses to measure, reduce, and offset their carbon emissions by providing them end to end carbon management, and a one stop shop for all carbon emissions requirements. iLuEarth was part of the Compass Pre-incubator programme.
11. Madiba
Members: Kwabena Mensah, Benjamin Amoh
Madiba aims to speed up Africa’s transition into renewable energy by creating a centralised platform where interested customers can view available competitive products at affordable prices. Their platform takes away the pain of installer and supplier research and lack of information to make an informed decision. It also aims to provide adequate financial resources for users offering by the option to make instalment payments at very low interest rates and help installers and suppliers reduce their customer acquisition and marketing cost significantly. Their MVP can be found at their website, which is a repository for renewable companies. They are currently working on integrating other features, and in the process of expanding their team in Finland as well as in the US. Madiba was part of the Compass Pre-incubator programme.
12. aIC
Members: Jakob German, Bradley Jermy, Aoxing Liu, Andrius Vabalas, Pekka Vartiainen, Essi Viippola, Feiyi Wang, Vilma Lammi
As electronic-health-records (EHR) become embedded into medical practice, the volume of data will become overwhelming. aIC's product uses machine learning methods to personalise medical records, highlighting relevant information pertaining to a patient visit while suggesting diagnoses in a probabilistic manner. This will reduce doctor's time spent reviewing the EHR while broadening the diagnoses considered; thus, improving health system’s sustainability and reducing risk of misdiagnosis.
Their targets are private healthcare companies and public hospitals interested in improving the efficiency and sustainability of their service. Furthermore, they aim to provide patients with an application to promote better transparency and accessibility to their own health data. More information about their research team can be found on their website.
13. Greenpay
Members: Yvonne Yu, Masood Arai, Yousef Al-Nazer
GreenPay is developing an ESG SaaS solution, helping enterprises manage and optimise their environmental related data, transforming emission, energy, waste, and supply chain data into analytics and charts. They aim to help enterprises to utilise data to mitigate emissions, enhance SDG performance, and deepen their ESG transparency. Greenpay tackles the problem of lack of awareness of potential environmental risk will trigger a larger crisis for enterprises. Along with the manufacturing process, massive environmental related data are often generated without proper sorting and engineering.
14. HydroXgel
Members: Robert Luxenhofer, Muhammad Waqas Ali, Mengxue Lu, Andrew Kerr, Aşkıcan Hacıoğlu
HydroXgel is a synthetic thermo- responsive polymer. Scalability is easy, which enables them to have a higher profit margin than competitors. Beyond bioinks, their platform is ideally positioned for other products in different areas such as drug delivery and cosmetics. Bioinks are understood as hydrogels that can be combined with living cells, which can be used for 3D bioprinting of artificial tissues or organ constructs. Biobased bioinks are currently the most prevalent commercial products, but these are plagued by poor printability and high costs. HydroXgel solves all the problems with its unique combination of traits including superior printability, versatility, cytocompatibility and modularity.
15. Superhood
Members: Markku Mehtälä, Mikko Väisänen
Superhood is a location based social platform for people, businesses, and cities. With Superhood, people can keep up with and influence the neighbourhoods they care about, whereas Superhood's tools help businesses, cities, and authorities to engage and interact with local people. This service aggregates local news and information, helps with discovery, and enables social interaction. The service aims to be inclusive, does not have mandatory user accounts or closed groups, and all the data is geolocated. Superhood is built for the complete local ecosystems.
16. Blinkapp
Members: Carlos de la Torre, Konstantinos Kousouris, Dimitris Georgiou
Blink is a white-label budgeting app that innovates and differentiates banks, which it sees as losing the race against fintech’s. It aims to increase customer loyalty by offering practical innovations to users (B2B). Their product offers personalised financial advice powered by artificial intelligence to help users manage their money, build savings, and relieve the stress of not having money at the end of the month (B2C). Competitor’s apps target consumers directly and fail to address the market gap of partnering with banks and key differentiation such as AI-powered personalisation.
17. AiLobe Health
Members: Svetlana Sharifulina, Antonio Carvalho da Silva, Shamsiiat Abdurakhmanova, Cecilia Brunello
AiLobe Health aims to promote long-term brain health through personalised recommendations based on the latest scientific evidence and reduce the risk of mental health issues and diseases, including early dementia and stroke. They're developing an AI-based platform that analyses and filters scientific research to provide customer-targeted programs to improve quality of life. Their strength is a multidisciplinary team that combines neuroscience expertise with technology.
18. Origami
Members: Hiroshi Doyu, Haruka Doyu, Roberto Morabito
Origami seeks to introduce "TinyML" and "TinyML as-a-Service", running ML inferences on microcontrollers in IoT sensors, which won't rely on networks and the Cloud unnecessarily. This would enable new secure and energy efficient use cases of ML applications (e.g., military, healthcare, and maritime scenarios). Origami aims to solve the problem that current Machine Learning (ML) systems face, which is always run-on big Cloud GPUs that rely heavily on networks (latency, throughput, and reliability). This network dependency sometimes restricts potential ML use cases. Furthermore, moving sensor data from on-premises to the cloud isn't always ensured securely. For further information please check their YouTube Video, https://youtu.be/m2sHB4DOfMg
19. Value Me
Members: Jiachen Ye, Bogdan Kurjakov, Mengzhen Zhang
The team aims to develop and provide a clear and informative way to present data to consumers on groceries and other fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) via a smartphone app. This mobile app will show information across six dimensions that will guide consumers in making more informed decisions on healthy, cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and ethical bases. Their app service will show personalised recommendations for product categories based on both personal information and ML-based (Machine Learning) recommendation algorithms. Their monetisation model is through partnerships with retail chains and advertising on the app.
20. Silva-Trace
Members: Marianne Koppatz, Jyrki Ollikainen, Kha Nguyen
Silva-trace develops an app and a user customer interface platform for tracking wood origin. They aim to start the concept / customer interface using blockchain technology to trace the wood along the whole supply chain, therefore bringing added value to the consumer who is willing to pay a premium to get this type of data. The current wood supply and processing practices in the Finnish forest industry do not support the transparency of the tree origin to the end-user of the wood product (consumer). Silva-Trace considers that certain consumer groups are willing to pay a premium for pro-environmental (sustainable) origin data of these trees / wood and this could be authentically presented as being an exclusive service. Silva-Trace was part of the Compass Pre-incubator programme.