Fifteen outstanding startups have advanced to the next stage of the W.A. de Vigier Awards, moving one step closer to securing up to five coveted CHF 100,000 prizes. In the next evaluation round, the foundation board will select the top ten finalists, who will present their solution at the award ceremony on 18 June 2025.Selected from a pool of 50 promising young companies, the top 15 startups impressed a live audience, online viewers, and the foundation board of the W.A de Vigier Award with their groundbreaking ideas during Selection Day in late February. The rigorous selection process began with over 200 applications spanning eight industry clusters. The finalists will undergo further evaluation through expert reports and in-depth interviews with the foundation board. They will select the Top 10 finalists who will proceed to the grand award ceremony on June 18, 2025.The top 15 startups are:Axmed | Emmanuel Akpakwu | Access to medicines for allAxmed is a B2B medicines marketplace transforming healthcare access four underserved communities worldwide

Industrial automation startup Flink Robotics has received €156k from Venture Kick to enable robots to adapt to dynamic environments. The ETH spinoff, led by CEO Dr. Moritz Geilinger, CTO Simon Huber, and CSO Prof. Dr. Stelian Coros, will use the funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and undertake additional pilot projects. Flink Robotics' software, FlinkAutonomy, allows robots to perceive and react to environmental changes, targeting industries like parcel delivery and packaging.

Intel Ignite, Intel's global startup accelerator program for early-stage deeptech startups, has announced the 10 startups who make up its seventh cohort, which will convene in Munich.Deeptech is now the largest VC funding category in Europe according to Dealroom, with artificial intelligence and quantum computing startups raising the most capital.The current cohort includes startups from Germany, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden which have each raised €7M on average and are focused on broad spectrum of deeptech, from semiconductor manufacturing, silicon and photonics to memory compression, data streaming, AI processing, and applications in the robotics and satellite space.The startups in the new European cohort are:AIRMO - High-precision, AI-driven greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions analytics generated from own multi-sensor-equipped satellites.Cartken - All vision-based, low-cost self-driving stack for outdoor robotics in industrial and last-mile delivery applications.Flink - Multi-robot software platform enabled by AI computer vision and motion control intelligence.LUBIS EDA - AI-driven cloud platform to preemptively detect and fix chip bugs before production.NcodiN - Laser-integrated photonic technology for high-speed, energy-efficient interconnects in advanced chip packages.Pathway - Unified batch and event stream data processing for complex, high-speed data transformations.SCIL - Substrate conformal imprint lithography solutions for high-volume patterning at the nanoscale level.Ultralytics - Provider of open-source YOLO models and no-code platform to build, train & deploy computer vision applications.Waveye - AI-driven, high-res 4D radar imaging for autonomous systems.ZeroPoint - Soft IP for hardware-accelerated, secure and lossless compression across the entire memory architecture.Since the program launched in 2019, collectively, Intel Ignite alumni have secured over $2.5 billion in funding.“Having recently been valued at $3 trillion in the latest State of European Tech report and attracting talent from around the world, the European tech ecosystem is thriving,” said Tzahi Weisfeld, VP & GM at Intel Ignite.“At the end of the day, our mission from a macro perspective is to support and foster that ecosystem, and with these 10 disruptive startups joining Intel Ignite in Europe this spring, we are looking forward to not only working with them to help them find their go-to-market fit and increase their valuations and grow revenue, but also to empower the founders to do these faster and cheaper than they would have on their own, and to become key pillars in that continuously-growing ecosystem.”