Demonstrator Lab successful in NWO valorisation Take off grants

Several Demonstrator Lab projects have received an award for a feasibility study or early phase trajectory within the NWO TTW Take-off program. D-Lab helps enterprising students and researchers to turn their ideas into tangible products and services. The Meta-grip, a tool for climbers, and Fitsurance, with tailor-made lifestyle advice on physical exercise and nutrition, are able to do a feasibility study withTake-off grant phase I. Scitodate, a Big Data and AI company, received a start-up loan to further develop their new company. With these awards all requests from Demontrator Lab projects for a feasibility study or early phase trajectory of NWO TTW’s Take-off program have been honored.

Meta-grip and Fitsurance

The Meta-grip is a functional strength assessment tool for monitoring hand and fingertip health and performance in climbers. Fitsurance measures health parameters and provides customized lifestyle advise about exercise and diet online and through a mobile application, to reduce sick-leaves, prevent diseases and reduce health costs.

Scitodate wins NWO Take-off grant Phase 2

Scitodate has been awarded the Take-off Phase 2 by NWO, a loan for startups to further develop their new company.  Scitodate is a Big Data and AI company, specialized in making scientific research easy to find and understand.
Leading manufacturers of scientific research equipment use Scitodate technology (Market Landscape) to map out their market and find out who would need their products.

Findest and Scitodate jointly received an Mkb subsidy

Findest and Scitodate have been awarded Mkb-innovatiestimulering Regio en Topsectoren (MIT) to jointly develop JARVLIS, an AI engine for Scientific Natural Language Inference. The two companies will be working together to develop and commercialize algorithms to extract scientific facts from body of scientific literature. Findest and Scitodate are both D-Lab alumni and are now based in Amsterdam Venture Studios at VU Campus

Fitsurance – Health is Wealth

Applicant: Sauvik Das Gupta, VU Amsterdam
Health costs in the Netherlands are rising faster than the GNP. The rise in costs is partly due to the lack of sufficient daily activity, poor dietary choices and in some cases lack of knowledge about general health. As a result of this, the incidence and prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer is increasing with a concomitant substantial rise in health costs as a result. To tackle this problem, the population needs to live more healthily and this can be realised by increasing the general awareness of health. We want to achieve this by offering individuals a health check-up linked to a consultation about exercise and nutrition. The consultation will be offered through a mobile application that will also monitor the daily activity. Not only the population will benefit from this, but also companies (decrease in sick leave), health insurers (decrease in costs and incidence of illness) and the government (healthier population).

“Meta-grip”: monitoring grip force to minimize hand injuries and improve climbing performance

Applicant: Dr Dominic Orth, VU Amsterdam
Sport climbing has grown worldwide into a popular and frequently practiced sports activity. The functional gripping power of the hands and fingers is an important factor for determining the performance, but at the same time it forms an important source of injuries (about 40% of all injuries among climbers are hand or finger related). Consequently, there is an urgent need to objectively monitor the functional gripping force as evidence-based support for preventing and treating hand and finger injuries. We have therefore developed the “meta-grip”, an innovative tool to measure climbing-specific gripping force on various types of grip and slope angles. With the meta-grip, we want to help climbers to monitor their progress, balance their training, prevent or treat injuries and to improve their performance.

Scitodate Market Landscape: Using AI for mapping out addressable markets for manufacturers of scientific research equipment.

Applicant: Dr Mehdi Farzanehpour, VU Amsterdam
Scitodate was founded to make scientific knowledge easy to find and understand. Our strategy to take such an ambitious vision on is to explore the severely underused wealth contained in academic literature. The new wave of AI has very recently made it possible to extract complex information from scientific literature at a global scale, and we found ourselves at a privileged position to make it happen.

Obviously, this is a long-term vision, so we have decided to focus on a single stakeholder and on a single value proposition to help establish healthy foundations to our business during the first 3-5 years. We currently help research instrument manufacturers find their ideal customers. Experimental research is done with expensive highly specialized equipment, so their producers face the challenge of selling to a niche and sparse global market.

The Scitodate Market Landscape shows the whole addressable market of a research instrument manufacturer at a glance. It leverages academic literature to help producers get the most out of their conference trips and offers an alternative scalable source for highly qualified sales leads.

Scitodate is a proud alumni of the Rockstart Accelerator, the Amazon AWS Startup Program and the Google Cloud Startup Program.

About Take off

Take-off is a program for stimulating and supporting business and entrepreneurship from science. This may involve product, process, care or service innovation in the broadest sense of the word and within all scientific areas. From science and technology, life sciences to alpha and gamma. This program offers financing options that enable academic entrepreneurs, but also starters from higher professional education, to bring their innovative research results to the market.