Five of the exhibiting teams also present their business ideas at the founder pitch and try to convince the jury and the audience:
- Team 1: Aura
- Team 2: auvisus
- Team 3: Cepri
- Team 4: Kamedi
- Team 5: RoomPriceGenie
NEULAND - The Innovation Day at KIT
Founders Exhibition
Aura
Aura is the revolutionary sleep coach that allows you to measure, understand and improve your sleep. For this, the start-up combines a comfortable sensor headband, artificial intelligence and crowdsourcing. Unlike a sleep lab, Aura does not require complicated wiring to accurately determine more than 20 sleep parameters (including sleep phases, breathing, heart activity, movement, sleep environment). Recorded measurement data is encrypted and wirelessly transmitted to the Aura app.
This identifies sleep problems and presents them in a way that the user can understand. With the help of the community, new treatment methods for sleep problems are systematically identified and then processed individually and automatically for each user. The start-up's goal is to build a company that fundamentally changes the way we deal with health problems. Bio-sensor technology, artificial intelligence and the derivation of novel treatment methods form the cornerstone for this.
auvisus
Two billion meals are collected manually every year in company restaurants in Germany. This not only leads to long waiting times for diners, but also generates high costs for operators. A solution must be found for communal catering that saves personnel costs and enables higher turnover at peak times.
The start-up auvisus enables automation of the checkout process through artificial intelligence in image processing. The tray is placed under the camera, the algorithm recognizes and classifies the dishes on the tray and payment can be completely automated.
Cepri
Livestock production is one of the main causes of climate change. At the same time, global demand for animal proteins is expected to increase dramatically in the coming years. Cepri's concern is therefore to exploit sustainable food resources from edible insects. Insects require less feed, use less land and emit fewer greenhouse gases than conventional livestock.
The larvae of the flour beetle are particularly suitable as a source of protein for humans due to their amino acid composition. To optimize insect breeding, the start-up has developed the Minilivestock Printer. This harvesting system makes it possible to monitor the insects' egg production efficiency and synchronize development cycles. Cepri's feed formulations also allow the nutritional composition of the products to be adapted to customer requirements. From the larvae, the startup produces protein and fat isolates as well as insect meal through a downstream processing process they developed. Fertilizer and chitin can be produced from by-products.
Heat_it (Kamedi)
As beautiful as summer is, it has one major drawback: itchy mosquito and painful wasp bites. Fortunately, for symptom treatment there is the scientifically proven principle of hyperthermia - treatment by means of heat. Available products could not convince the founders of Kamedi and so they made the heat_it a reality. The heat_it is an add-on for the smartphone to treat insect bites.
It is so robust and compact that you always have it to hand, especially during outdoor activities such as hiking or the bike ride to the swimming lake. If necessary, it is removed from the key ring and inserted into the smartphone. Via the app, the treatment can be set individually, for example, according to the cause of the bite (mosquito, wasp, gadfly, etc.) or sensitivity, and it works exclusively with heat, without chemicals. Thus, it is perfectly suitable for children as well. After its founding in October 2018, the heat_it is currently in the approval process as a medical device and is expected to be launched in spring 2020.
prenode
Companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) to make better decisions based on existing data. In doing so, companies in the same industry solve the same problems over and over again, such as predicting sales figures, identifying fraud or analyzing customer behavior. The development is costly and the developed AI is only trained on limited data. prenode uses innovative technologies to develop AI on distributed datasets across companies.
In partnership with industry platforms, prenode creates a hub that allows AI to be trained at one company and further developed on data from other companies. The developed AI is thereby made available to all participating companies. Participants thus benefit from more accurate predictions, reduced development time and the existing data is not revealed to the other participants at any time.
RoomPriceGenie
Larger hotels and chains already change their room prices like airlines. Full-time revenue managers often use multiple analytics solutions to calculate room prices based on a variety of data sources. The losers of this trend include smaller hotels, B&Bs or hostels, which often change prices only seasonally or spend a lot of time using Excel. Thus, RoomPriceGenie's target group either loses guests when prices are too high or revenue when prices are too low - mostly quite unnoticed.
In recent years, therefore, there has been a shift in overall revenue from small to large. RoomPriceGenie has developed an algorithm that provides automated, real-time optimal price recommendations for smaller hotels as well. Hoteliers can upload these with one click, and once they trust the startup, put them on auto-pilot. Per day, RoomPrice-Genie processes tens of thousands of data points per customer. On average, customers generate 15% more revenue, which can lead to a doubling of profits due to the high fixed costs. The startup's focus is on a super simple user experience.
thingsTHINKING
Corporate knowledge is often available in unstructured documents such as tenders, documentation and standards. This constantly growing amount of information must be sifted through by subject matter experts at great expense of time and under time pressure - a machine evaluation is cumbersome or even impossible with common tools. thingsTHINKING develops and sells the AI platform Semantha, which makes this knowledge accessible and usable in an automated way.
Semantha makes knowledge discoverable, reads and understands texts, remembers their meaning and prepares decisions or gives recommendations for action. As an intelligent assistant, Semantha facilitates the daily work of experts in a wide range of industries: Insurance companies, tax consultants and lawyers benefit from its support just as much as engineers at mechanical engineering companies and automotive suppliers. The theoretical foundations stem from research in the fields of computational linguistics, software engineering and AI. The foundation of thingsTHINKING took place in February 2017, the broad market entry started in mid/end 2018.
Simutence
In contrast to many other materials, fiber composite components require information about the microstructure in addition to the material properties, since this is largely responsible for the mechanical properties. Here, the fibers with their local properties have the greatest influence. Since these are mainly influenced by the manufacturing process, the prediction of the manufacturing process is an elementary prerequisite for the robust structural design of fiber composites.
SIMUTENCE offers significantly improved simulation approaches for the industrially relevant manufacturing processes in combination with a virtual process chain. This enables the purely virtual prediction of relevant manufacturing effects, which are taken into account by the virtual process chain in the structural design. In this way, manufacturability can be assured at early stages of development. SIMUTENCE offers the virtual process chain in the form of engineering services and add-on modules for commercially available simulation software.