Surprising ideas at the Weconomy start-up competition

Theresa Vilsmaier

Fertility helper: The start-up Levy Health by reproductive medicine specialist Theresa Vilsmaier wants to enable couples with an unfulfilled desire to have children to have faster diagnostics.

Theresa Vilsmaier has to be brief. Like all founders, the gynecologist and reproductive medicine specialist only has five minutes to present herself and the idea for her young company in the start-up competition.

“Every sixth couple has an unfulfilled desire to have children,” Vilsmaier begins her presentation. And in three out of four cases, infertility is diagnosed too late. From her point of view, there are several reasons for this: On the one hand, the women affected rarely sought advice from a specialized fertility clinic out of a sense of shame.

On the other hand, the gynecologists consulted instead are not sufficiently trained in the crucial field of hormone medicine. “We are in a diagnostic crisis,” says Vilsmaier.

At that moment, she received a first nod of approval from the ranks of the jury members. They will later agree that the Berlin start-up Levy Health should be one of this year’s ten winners in the competition.

Top jobs of the day

Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.

Because Vilsmaier promises that she and her co-founders will be able to reduce the average diagnosis time from four and a half years to two weeks with special software for fertility diagnostics – and Weconomy is the competition that has set itself the goal of turning good ideas into successful companies.

Winning start-ups meet bosses from Bosch, BASF and Co.

The Munich start-up center UnternehmerTUM and the Wissensfabrik business network, in which more than 130 companies are involved, are behind the initiative. Anyone who wins at Weconomy gets to know high-ranking managers from companies such as Bosch, BASF, Boehringer Ingelheim and EnBW and is trained in workshops on market and sales, for example.

In the end, both sides should benefit. The jurors, who bring expertise in start-up financing, management consulting, entrepreneurship and journalism, should also pay attention to this. The chairman of the jury and former managing director of the Roland Berger management consultancy, Burkhard Schwenker, points this out to his colleagues at the beginning: “We want to pay attention to new technologies. And the exchange should be exciting for the established companies.”

>> Read here: Germany can save 42 billion euros with digital medicine

Levy Health is targeting a market expected to grow to more than $78 billion by 2025, according to Theresa Vilsmaier. The young company is now looking for contact with health insurance companies, employee benefit institutions and pharmaceutical companies that could be potential buyers of the fertility diagnostics solution.

The venture capital investor Bettine Schmitz from the venture capitalist Auxxo is sure that the network will take care of the young company: “The Levy Health team, with the pairing of medical and business expertise and experience, has knitted an offer that can create real added value for the patients .”

Jörn Philipp Lies

The co-founder of Eye2you, Jörn-Philipp Lies, wants to use the retina to decode diseases.

Wide range of innovative ideas

On Thursday, the jurors were also given an overview of the German innovation landscape.

In addition to Levy, the team led by physicist Henriette Maaß, who wants to use Nanostruct to make the smallest impurities and pollutants visible more quickly – for example to detect diseases in tomato plants at an early stage – was also convincing.

Deep Scenario, led by former Bosch research engineer Holger Banzhaf, is developing a solution for customers in the automotive industry to speed up the training of autonomous vehicles. Andreas Eberhardt simplifies the economical operation of photovoltaic systems on small apartment buildings with pioneering power.

Christopher Feist’s Papair develops innovative technologies for the production of packaging materials. Bersa Shazimani and Celina Götte founded Juniorjob to help young people find internships and part-time jobs via an app.

Two medical start-ups look patients deep in the eye: Eye2you from company boss Jörn-Philipp Lies specializes in examining the retina and offers a “retinacorder” that is said to be able to detect a wide variety of diseases.

With Deepeye Medical, founder Manuel Opitz wants to support doctors in treating patients with eye diseases individually with data. Merle Fuchs founded Pramomolecular to develop new treatment methods for particularly aggressive cancers.

This year the competition is already in its 16th round. For the first time, 126 teams applied. Past winners include biopharmaceutical company Curevac and e-bike maker Fazua, which was recently acquired by Porsche.

More: “Whoever has to raise capital has a hard time”: The start-up scene is concerned about the economic crisis

source site-11