AVS start-ups continue to develop despite COVID-19

Start-ups and spin-offs affiliated to the Amsterdam Venture Studios establish new partnerships, keep developing and adjusting their innovative products and continue to take the stage in events, despite the disruptive changes the COVID-19 pandemic made in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Partnerships

Establishing new partnerships is important for start-ups. Through partnerships, start-ups can develop their market strategy and reach, get access to investments and gain industry expertise.

During the pandemic, Triply, a startup at the Amsterdam Venture Studio location VUmc that offers software that stores data in knowledge graphs, started working together with the Dutch Ministry of Finance. This partnership gives the Ministry the opportunity to validate its workflow during its budget implementation cycle in an automated way.

Also, Fitsurance, a startup based at the VU, just started a partnership with Clear., a leading start-up in providing personalized nutrition recommendations. The start-ups launched the ‘NutriFit’ program, with which users can discover how their bodies react to nutrition and exercise.

Digi.bio, a startup that accelerates the development of programmable cells, joined forces with EV Biotech to digitise, miniaturise and accelerate cell-line development for therapeutic applications. The MIT R&D grant of Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland kickstarted the collaboration.

Lastly, Braincreators, a startup at Amsterdam Venture Studio’s Startup Village that turns AI technology into accessible software, collaborated with SPIE to develop smarter processes for the real estate, infrastructure and industrial industries.

Acknowledgement

During the pandemic, several start-ups were also given recognition for their work and were given space to present their innovations. For example, the Amsterdam Venture Studio’s startups Digi.Bio and NextRound became finalists in the Academic Startup Competition. The winning startups will be awarded an online program to attend the incubator track organised by the Consulate General of San Francisco.

Also, Findest, a start-up at Amsterdam Venture Studio VU Campus that scouts technologies by using IGOR^AI, effectively supported a Finnish electricity grid operator Fingrid Oyj to find out how they could increase the transmission capacity or eliminate bottlenecks. In an interview, Fingrid Oyj stated that “IGOR identified some truly impressive technologies.” Read more

Altaventus, a start-up at Amsterdam Venture Studio’s Startup Village that innovates the decision-making methodologies used by aerospace engineering and energy companies, was given the opportunity to present their work at the ESA Phi Week 2020. They saw the relevance of their recent work “Use of Domain Aware Machine Learning for Digital Twin Earth Applications” on multiple fields of Earth Observation.

Lastly, Bit, also a startup at Startup Village, will give a webinar on December 3 in which they will show practical and influential developments in the field of Computer Vision.

Effective ecosystem

The Amsterdam Venture Studios is trying to work as effectively as possible during the pandemic. With the new marketing manager of the Amsterdam Venture Studios, Marloes van Leersum, we hope to create an effective ecosystem for the start-ups affiliated with the studios during these harsh times. To get a small taste of the Amsterdam Venture Studio’s, you can listen to the podcast of the Amsterdam Law Hub, in which innovations within law are discussed.