The winner of today’s XL-Day pitching competition is ARION, the startup that already won a Gerard & Anton Award at Innovation Origin’s Startup-to-Watch event last week. ARION receives a week long networking trip to Shanghai, China. ARION produces smart insoles to measure your running technique, it helps to prevent injuries and with an app the user gets coaching on how to improve their way of running. Out of around 50 startups that pitched today the jury chose six finalists. Next to ARION (ATO-gear), they are:
Fresh Strips, they make food safety indicator stickers that monitor the temperature of food packaging, to prevent that food is being thrown away unnecessarily.
Delft-circuits, who were invited to connect the ecosystems of Delft and Eindhoven. Delft-circuits makes circuits and cabling for quantum computing that enable installing large computers in a couple of hours instead of months. The computers can also be larger through smart cabling.
Minifab3D: they team up to 3D print teeth in 15 minutes, so you only have to make one appointment at the dentists’, to place a crown for example. Minifab3D produces 3Dprinters and in Mexico they’re already delivering printers to consumers.
Cytosmart: they developed a cloud based microscope which makes it possible to count cells way faster. Their goal is to make research easier and cheaper for biologists.
Recath: this is the new product of Eindhoven Medical Robotics. They have developed a minimally invasive robotic catheterization technology. The steerable device utilizes Bluetooth. With this technology surgeons don’t have to wear heavy x-ray protective suits.
From these six finalists only Minifab3D and ReCath are currently part of the accelerator programme of HighTechXL.
This was the first time XL-Day was hosted in the Evoluon with a day filling programme. Several expert talked about broad subjects in tech. Guus Frericks, co-founder of HighTechXL is happy with the new concept, he told the crowd at the start of the event: “We want to mobilize the startup community, come together and create new fast growing companies. We need to stay relevant and be ahead of the game. Our goal is to out-innovate everyone in this world. Today we take a new step towards a tech conference.” By 2020, HighTechXL wants to have accelerated 20 to 30 companies that are growing fast. 11 startups that featured in the accelerator programme in the past are scaling up today. “So we set ourselves an aggressive goal, we are not there yet. We have to work hard and try to strengthen the ecosystem”, says Frericks.
Today around 50 startups pitched for 3 jury panels. Less than half of the startups that are pitching came from High Tech XL, emphasizes Frericks. “We want to share knowledge and empower the ecosystem.”
Watch the video impression of XL-Day made by Bert-Jan Woertman below:
