Advertima wins Swisscom StartUp Challenge
St.Gallen – The St.Gallen-based IT company Advertima is one of five winners of this year’s Swiss Startup Challenge. The startup will now have its artificial intelligence technology reviewed by industry experts in Silicon Valley.
The Swisscom Startup Challenge is aimed at startups in the fintech, smart cities, artificial intelligence, e-commerce and high-tech industries. The competition was held this year for the fifth successive year, with 201 startups applying. 10 made it into the final round, where they pitched their business models in front of an expert jury on Thursday.
Advertima is among this year’s winners, which also include the software developer AlgoTrader, the robot manufacturer ecoRobotix, the medical diagnostics firm 1Drop and the drone infrastructure developer OneSky.
“What a generation! We were bowled over by their ideas and personalities. Now it’s up to us to help them do great things in the tough environment of the real world,” Roger Wüthrich-Hasenböhler, Chief Digital Officer at Swisscom, said in a statement.
Beat Schillig, CEO of venturelab, was also on the jury. venturelab is part of the startup institute IFJ, which has offices in Schlieren in the canton of Zurich, St.Gallen and Lucerne.
The five winners will travel to Silicon Valley on 24 September to take part in the Business Acceleration Programme, a tailored mentoring programme that will examine their business models and assist them in reaching out to potential investors.
Advertima develops software based on artificial intelligence that analyses the environment or appearance of people. Headquartered in the St.GallenBodenseeArea, the company also made it into the finals of StartfeldDiamant, a start-up competition run by the St.Galler Kantonalbank (SGKB). In June it secured 4.8 million Swiss francs in risk capital in a financing round.