Eindhoven is emerging as THE high-tech innovation center in Europe, yet no one has heard of it.
We want to change that because you might want to come here to invest, to join a startup or to attend university. We’re even creating an effort – Tech Sister Cities – to connect startups here to early stage investors in the United States, especially in the Midwest and South.
With people coming from the four corners of the globe, Eindhoven defines our core mission of documenting the global mobility of talent.
There’s so much going on – so much innovation – at our headquarters city that our media startup can’t cope. So we decided to create a special semi-regular feature, the Eindhoven Business Briefing.
What’s going on this week?
Eindhoven might be the ultra-high-tech capital of the world with both ASML and NXP based here. But there’s a new kid in town who’s playing against type.
Arno Hermans has created Sport eXperience, the Netherlands’ first and only accelerator for sports startups, and he’s gone international in record time.
ARNO HERMANS
The long game is not just entrée into the United States, but positioning Sport eXperience as the gateway for U.S.-based startups who want to expand into the larger European market, Hermans told us back in June.
After moving into Denmark, Dublin and Milan, Sport eXperience started a relationship in August with Sportlab, an Istanbul-based startup that does sports testing, measuring whether, for example, a soccer pitch meets FIFA regulations.
At the moment, Sport eXperience has parallel accelerators running in Eindhoven and Copenhagen.
Tuesday, you can check out the participants’ progress at The Blue Collar Hotel in Eindhoven’s Strijp-S innovation quarter.
The event, which starts at 18:30, is billed as a startup dinner, but the companies will be there pitching, as well.
Companies presenting are:
• Advanced Pro Basketball, a sports data science startup, includes team member DeMarcus Berry who has been on the basketball scene for a few years and actually played. Now he is crunching the numbers to help those on and off the court to understand and appreciate the game more.
• CloudTimer is a Dutch startup which develops cloud-based timing and race-management technology for sports including bikes, autos and equestrian sports. Maarten Holdrinet and Robert Bouten are the former professional/Olympic athletes behind CloudTimer.
• Defter Sports is a Costa Rican startup creating affordable and easy-to-use performance analytics technology for football.
• ELCIES, based in both the UK and the Netherlands, is an intelligent platform and bot for aggregating data from multiple wearables monitoring fitness, health and diet.
• GetLevelUP is a real-time performance analysis system for football teams.
• Motivu: Denmark-based Motivu is a tool for personal fitness trainers to coach running and training. The tool allows coaches to offer their services to users and collect payment via the app. The users will get an easy overview of workouts nearby and let them follow their favorite coaches.
• Peakout is a Danish startup that makes it possible to choose between training facilities, times and locations in Denmark directly from the smartphone.
Also, Sport eXperience is having its second annual Sports Business Day on 9 November in Philips Stadium, home to PSV Eindhoven.
You can get tickets to both events here on Eventbrite.
Here’s the full list of upcoming events:
October 3: Startup Dinner | Eindhoven
October 8-10: Danish mission
October 9: Idan Sports Innovation Day | Copenhagen
November 9: Sport Business Day | Eindhoven
November 26 – 30: Play the Game conference | Eindhoven
HighTechXL
It’s been a super-busy late summer, and as part of that mad dash to see all the talent, we attended an initial meeting between some of the startups in the current HighTechXL cohort and mentors at High Tech Campus Eindhoven. All the startups in the high-tech hardware startup made impressive introductions, but several stood out including:
• Mexico-based Hakken Enterprise develops a non-invasive test, capable of detecting both papilloma virus (HPV) infection and cancer propensity (cervical or prostate), simultaneously.
• TicTag is creating new technology for better connectivity including roll-to-roll nano-silver printers – essentially, a high-tech stamp – that can be connected to every product, service or object to give it an online component.
From their website:
(The) smart tag which contains a digital and unique fingerprint. This tag triggers an action on your phone or tablet by touching the capacitive screen. The internet of Things is nearby and gives you the opportunity to interact with almost anything in daily life.
• BrainControl, from Italy, is creating artificial intelligence for human-machine interaction through biofeedback. This technology can help overcome severe physical and communication disabilities of the “locked in syndrome” that can affect people in latter stages of progressive nerve diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
There are LOT of great ideas … too many to capture in one post. You can see the full list here.
One of the more surprising aspects of HighTechXL is how international it’s becoming, with more promising startups from Israel, Mexico, South Korea and Eastern European countries.
We’ll have a follow-up post as the accelerator continues.
Usono
Speaking of HighTechXL, alumnus Usono just signed a global distributor for their ProbeFix non-invasive ultrasound device.
Mermaid Medical, based in Denmark, just posted this on their website at the end of September:
We are proud to announce that we have signed a distribution contract with the Eindhoven startup, Usono, for the Netherlands, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland for the next four years. Now that the official CE approval is received, we can enter the European market.
Oh, and Mermaid linked to Dispatches’ post about Usono from August. Yeah, baby, we get to sit at the cool kids’ table now!
We’ve been Usono fans now for more than a year, because they’ve been relentless in doing what so many startups struggle to do: Move from an idea into the marketplace. We know how difficult that is, and we’ll keep following Usono as they continue evolving into a larger medical-devices company, or get acquired.
BounceSpace
We went to the new BounceSpace startup and co-working and office space last Wednesday for a pitch night. Thanks to Nina Maurer for the drinks and great snacks.
There was a full house to see nine pitches that covered a wide range of ideas from conventional digital tech to foodtech. It also showed us that Eindhoven has a vital and diverse startup scene independent of the high-tech eco-systems at High Tech Campus and Technical University Eindhoven.
Here are some highlights from the evening:
• Organic Love: Organic Love is two guys with a great idea for making mayonnaise and other condiments, which often have a lot of calories and fat, from healthier ingredients. Not only do they have the expertise –Abdul Ali Ahmed is a chemist, Lou van de Wal is actual sous chef – they already have suppliers including companies that can use their recipes to make their products en masse.
• Skotty bills itself as the next big thing in file sharing. Skotty lets you share large amounts of data safely by adding additional levels of two-factor encryption between users without slowing down transfers. Mees Boeijen pitched a new technology that for a small fee lets users on any device get a super-fast, super-secure real-time connections for peer-to-peer sharing. We get it if Skotty can attract customers that need to send huge amounts of sensitive data, or can play a role in FinTech. We’ll see ….
• We really liked this one. SnapFood is a social dining app that lets people connect for spontaneous dinners with the motto, “Eat, meet and share.” The theme is that SnapFood “connects you with interesting people around the dinner table. Find or host dinners in your area!” We see this as especially appealing to expats who’ve just arrived in a new city. The way the app will be monetized is through promotion of kitchen-related products and supermarkets to users.
Money
A number of Eindhoven-based startups have attracted early-stage investments in the past month.
• Luxexcel, which makes 3-D printed lenses, just got a 4 million euro investment on 28 Sept. And this is huge. Luxexcel got the investment for prescription lenses for use in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications! Crazy. The investment comes from Innovation Industries, an Amsterdam-based Venture Capital fund.
This follows an earlier investment of 8.5 million euros investment from SET Ventures, Munich Venture Partners, PMV and KLA-Tencor to install their first industrial grade 3D printing platforms in the USA and Europe.
• LifeSense Group just received a $3 million investment from “an established Danish entrepreneur.” LifeSense makes Carin, a woman’s healthcare product that helps women combat bladder control and urine-loss issues common after childbirth, during menopause and throughout the aging process.
• SendCloud, an Eindhoven-based startup that has created an online shipping tool used by 10,000 stores in Europe, has just raised 5 million euros from two Netherlands-based early angel funds and one government economic-development eentity. The new investors henQ, BOM (the investment arm of the Brabant region, which includes Eindhoven) and TiiN Capital.
We know of a lot of other deals and investments, but have been sworn to secrecy.
So, let’s do it again when we’re cleared to post!
