Last year it was a TU München student who ran off with the first prize, this year the jury couldn’t help but designate a local Eindhoven candidate as the winner of the European Venture Programme. Ayushman Talwar from Hable Accessibility proved to be the best of a group of twenty tech-entrepreneurs from all over Europe after a process of writing and pitching. “We felt a bit anxious to appoint a local winner here in Eindhoven, but Hable simply had the most interesting concept”, said jury chairman Carmen van Vilsteren at the announcement. The prize for the best ‘two-pager’ went to Fanny Boutier of EPFL Lausanne with her start-up Nuage.
Read more about the set-up of the European Venture Programme here.
The European Venture Programme is an annual entrepreneurship programme for students and researchers from one of the EuroTech universities: TU Eindhoven, DTU Copenhagen, TU München, EPFL Lausanne, École Polytechnique Paris and Technion from Haifa. Each participant represents a startup created at the university and is given the opportunity to broaden their horizons by visiting several European cities. In all these places, they look for international opportunities for their company.
“Most engineers have mastered the technical development of a product. The programme is intended to further develop other aspects of entrepreneurship,” explains Steven van Huiden, coordinator of the programme in Eindhoven. For example, the programme focuses on the value proposition, marketing, sales and finance. “In this way, entrepreneurs gain more knowledge and immediately learn to think internationally.” This fits in well with the mission of the cooperation between the Eurotech universities.
Ayushman Talwar competed in the final against Camilo Toloza Albarracin (Dymium, TU Munich), Dennis van Ravenstein (MapsUntold, TU Eindhoven) and Mukesh Narendran (EcoOil, DTU Copenhagen). Their solutions for kidney stones, tourism and ecological fuel were defeated by Talwar’s concept of allowing blind people to make better use of their smartphones.
Take a look at the four pitches in the finals here:
In addition to the four finalists (who each got two minutes to make their point), the other participants also had the opportunity to tell something about their start-up in 30 seconds time. See them all here:
Hable also won a Gerard & Anton Award at IO’s annual startups-to-watch earlier this summer. Hable also won the ASML Makers Award at TU/e Contest 2018 and the Philips Innovation Rough Diamond Award.
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