MassChallenge Switzerland, part of MassChallenge’s global network for innovators and zero-equity startup accelerators, celebrated yesterday evening the winners of its 2024 Early-Stage Startup Accelerator Program, as well as the Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) Climate Resilience Prize laureate. This year, four of the winners are from Switzerland, Myriad Optics cashing the Platinum Award CHF 80’000 Prize.
Held in packed room in Beaulieu Lausanne, the ceremony rewarded the 12 MassChallenge Switzerland award-winning startups with CHF 400,000 equity-free cash prizes, in recognition of their innovative solutions that will add value to society. The ceremony was also marked by the announcement of the 2024 LDC Climate Resilience Prize, which this year goes to EcoBean.
During the evening, Swiss MassChallenge alumni SmartHelio, Planted and Bloom Biorenewables took to the stage to talk about the impact of the Lausanne-based startup accelerator on their development and growth.
Among this year’s Accelerator cash prizes winners, four are from Switzerland:
Platinum – CHF 80,000
- Myriad Optics an EPFL Spin-off, is developing new bacterial pathogen identification technologies to speed up testing in the food, pharmaceutical and medtech industries, to protect public health, avoid waste and help companies streamline their processes.
Gold – CHF 10,000
- Adastra Sustainability builds high-fidelity data from the ground up to reveal the impacts of land conversion at any level of traceability.
- Riverkin is combining large-scale water quality measurements and earth observation data with advanced hydrological models to support water resources management.
- SolidWatts is poised for massive scale-up by creating the new state-of-the-art in microwave dielectric heating for industrial processes.
Riverkin also won the One Young World Award cashing CHF 10,000
Raising the bar
In the evening MassChallenge Switzerland also recognized its community of experts, including the 446 independent judges and 478 mentors who supported 118 startups this year, to launch, grow and scale their businesses during the four-month acceleration program.
“I would like to thank all our partners, judges, mentors, and speakers who dedicated their time and energy to providing feedback and advice, and a special thanks to our diamond sponsors who ran significant startup events at their offices,” said Matt Lashmar, Managing Director of MassChallenge Switzerland. “2024 was our most ambitious and highest-rated program ever, with 78% of cohort startups rating the program as the ‘best ever’ and stating they’d score it 9 or 10 out of 10, if recommending it to another startup.”
(Press release)
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The new Swiss Venture Capital Report was published on 26 January. It analyses 304 financing rounds closed in 2020 and includes further article such as an interview with Michael Hengartner, President of the ETH Board, and a list of Swiss "soonicorns". 
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