With effective incubation, acceleration and scale-up programs, the Eindhoven-based HighTechXL aims to support hardware start-up founders from an early prototype to successful market entry and scale-up. This week, fourteen start-ups were selected for the upcoming fall ’16 program, the second since HighTechXL officially separated from Startupbootcamp earlier this year.
Fast-forward
HighTechXL’s accelerator program aims to fast-forward early stage hardware start-up’s market entry. In the half year program, start-ups get access to a community of over three hundred mentors and leading high-tech companies like ASML, NTS-Group and Philips. With many sports applications among the growing number of propositions, HighTechXL expanded the program with a group of five sports technology start-ups. The focus on sports was especially visible during the accelerator’s last investor demo day, where Sports and Vitality was a separate theme next to MedTech, Mobility, and Consumer goods.
Dreamz
One of the most interesting propositions from the selected batch comes from Polish start-up Dreamz, a self-described Virtual Reality solution for vision therapy. The immersive and interactive 3D VR-solution consists of a headset and hand-gesture control sensors that track hand-eye coordination tasks. With these tasks, the diagnosis and treatment of amblyopia and strabismus (lazy and crossed eye syndrome) in children can be accelerated significantly.
Spinal
Another promising proposition comes from Spinal, an Azerbaijan-based start-up that wants to end slouching and bad posture – an important yet underrated health issue among young people. Most of us sit behind our desk all day, and nobody wants to end up as Quasimodo at the end of his or her career. With Spinal, a wearable device helps you get into the habit of good posture by training muscles and their memory.
A full list of the selected start-ups can be found here.
