Noise pollution is nothing new to people living and working in big cities, yet what many may not be aware of is that it is also a major health risk. Delft-based startup DeNoize knows all about it and has made it its mission to tackle the challenges of noise pollution and enable a healthier living environment. How? By installing its active noise cancellation technology – similar to that in noise-cancelling headphones – into the frame of windows, drowning out the noise of the busy streets underneath and the large planes flying overhead.

FROM A SIMPLE IDEA

During his studies, Aman was looking into how to design airplanes to be less noisy and more efficient, and had a strong interest in mitigating aviation noise. “There is a lot of potential in finding a way to make airplanes less noisy,” says Aman, “but if I were to turn that into an impactful solution business, it would have taken years and years.”

Instead, he wanted to create something here and now, so he focused on putting a new spin to his research and findings. “I started looking at the problem from a different angle and decided to tackle noise issues on the receiver’s end instead of its source,” says Aman. He joined the incubator program of Deep Science Ventures, a six-month pressure cooker for entrepreneurs who want to solve key societal problems, to help him kickstart his venture.

“That’s where the whole idea came together. I decided to develop a solution that can be integrated into the facade of a building and isolate it from the outdoor noise.” In a nutshell, he made a plan to create a new generation of smart windows.

With active noise cancellation at the heart of it, a very specific type of technology in itself, Aman saw the need to look for a co-founder. He found that co-founder in the face of Olivier Schevin, a fellow entrepreneur based in France, with years of experience in exactly this field.

THROUGH YES!DELFT

With the Deep Science Ventures program behind him and a round of financing that he got at the end of it, Aman moved back to the Netherlands to continue working on the DeNoize technology. In December 2018, he and Olivier got accepted into YES!Delft’s Accelerator Program, which gave them the know-how and network they needed to take the startup to the next phase.

“YES!Delft is a specialized incubator that gave us the stamp of approval we needed in the market,” Aman says. “When we joined, we were also paired with a mentor, who has quite some experience in the glass industry, and that has been of great value to us.”

The community of startups that YES!Delft has built over the years has also proven to be beneficial to Aman and DeNoize.

“There are startups in different stages of their development so there is always someone who has been in your shoes and can advise you when you’re facing a challenge. Physee, for example, is working in the same market as us and it is always good to spar with them,” Aman adds.

TO A GROWING COMPANY

Today, in only two years’ time, DeNoize has grown from one man with an innovative idea to a team of over 20. Olivier is still based in France, with four students and an intern working alongside him. In the Netherlands, the startup has two full-time employees and three groups of students working on various design projects for it.

So far, the technology is in the prototyping stage and on its way to being converted into a product. “We’re working together with a glass manufacturer to make sure that our technology can fit into their products,” says Aman. “And based on recent tests, it looks good.”

While glass manufacturers could be a key customer segment for DeNoize, at this point they see them as their closest partners – working together on prototyping and knowledge-sharing. The product that will eventually be integrated in the frames of windows is planned to be ready within a year from now.

Keeping them going until then are several financing opportunities that the team has secured, including a loan from Rabobank, a round of funding from UNIIQ and grants from the government.

Perhaps one of the most notable achievements of the team so far is their collaboration with the Royal Schiphol Group, which they announced recently. The agreement between the two companies is for studying the effects of noise pollution on people who live in close proximity to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

The research is planned to start in October 2020 for a duration of one month. The goal will be to understand the effects of noise on residents’ well-being and investigate how DeNoize can play a role in improving the quality of life of those living close to major noise sources like airports, highways, and train stations.

“We are doing research on people’s perception of noise with regard to their comfort, stress levels and mood. We then want to simulate how our technology can improve their acoustic environment,” Aman says.

While the technology is not market-ready yet, Aman and his team are already talking to potential customers to make sure they have them lined up when the time comes. DeNoize is mostly focusing on real estate developers such as Schiphol Real Estate and Heijmans, who can increase the value of their buildings by integrating the startup’s noise cancelling technology.

From this point on, DeNoize will be focusing on putting their technology on the market and getting the right partners and customers onboard. Working together with a partner like Schiphol Group is sure to boost the startup on its way to success.

Milestones: 

March 2018: Aman started working on the DeNoize concept in London

May 2018: Founded DeNoize together with Olivier Schevin

July 2018: Raised £70,000 as pre-seed funding

August 2018: Built the first proof-of-concept prototype of DeNoize

October 2018: Joined the Get Started Program by ECE

February 2019: Joined the YES!Delft Accelerator Program

August 2019: 1st paid pilot with potential customers

October 2019: Raised €150,000 from Rabobank

December 2019: Set up a collaboration with a major airport

January 2020: Expanded the DeNoize team

With DeNoize set on a path of growth, the team is currently looking for programmers. Do you know someone or are you one? Get in touch with them now!

Apply now for our upcoming programs, and become part of an ecosystem with startups like DeNoize!

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Incubators and communities like YES!Delft are there to offer startups the support and know-how they need to start their innovative businesses and grow. They introduce them to a network of fellow innovators that they can draw resources and inspiration from. And every so often, that network yields some pretty interesting collaborations. This time focused on medtech

Bo Wiesman is a seasoned entrepreneur and the CEO of NewCompliance, an innovative company that offers predictive dashboarding and analytics solutions to hospitals. As of a few years ago, he is also the co-founder of Blue Sparrows, an investment fund for early-stage medtech companies.

Bo started Blue Sparrows together with six fellow medtech entrepreneurs and as a group, they are an example of what networking at YES!Delft can lead to. 

“We are all entrepreneurs from YES!Delft and this is where it all started back in 2014,” says Bo. “Because we were such a strong group of entrepreneurs, we got many requests from other medtech founders to provide advice or coaching, so we came up with the idea of setting up our own investment fund.” 

It took Bo and the rest of the team about four years to set the fund up and get it to do what it was meant to do – invest in high-potential medtech companies from across the country. Today, it also has two experienced fund managers onboard, whose expertise complements the entrepreneurial experience of the rest of the team.

An investment fund run by entrepreneurs

What makes Blue Sparrows different from other funds is that while it does have people with an investment background onboard, it is first of all run by entrepreneurs. 

Having built – and some even sold – their own business in the medtech sector, Bo and the rest of the team know what it takes to create a company from scratch. They have been through the ups and downs of being an early-stage company and can guide current startups to success, while avoiding the mistakes that they had once made. 

“We can help startups on a very operational level – from validating their idea or already existing product, to creating a business model that works, to clinical validation and medical certification,” says Bo. As a team, they believe that adding actionable knowledge and experience to a company early on can significantly increase their chance of success. They also look beyond the financials and at the potential that a startup holds. 

“We are entrepreneurs and not fund managers, so we can determine from our own experience whether a specific proposition has the potential to be successful. And because we are entrepreneurs, we can determine that way more clearly than fund managers can. They look mainly at the financial aspects, while we look at the product, the business model and the team – and help make adjustments where necessary.” 

Focusing on early-stage medtech startups – a conscious choice

A lot of people might think that investing in an early-stage, innovative company is risky business. And they wouldn’t be wrong. Yet, for Bo and the rest of Blue Sparrows, it was very clear why they should focus on that specific group. Making one wrong step early on in a business can be detrimental, so getting the right knowledge and advice at the right time is crucial. The team of Blue Sparrows is, therefore, of the opinion that they should only invest in companies that they can add real value to. 

“We tend to invest in the areas that we know extremely well, and that is medical technology,” says Bo. “It is not only about the money we invest, but also about the knowledge and coaching we can offer. That, too, has to be on a high level.” 

To date, they have made five investments in startups that they believe have the potential to develop a solution, which creates value for both patients and doctors. In the initial stage, Blue Sparrows invests typically between 200,000-250,000 euros per startup, and mentorship and coaching come as part of the package. The fund subsequently continues to invest as the company grows and achieves new milestones.

One of their most recent and also successful investments has been in a startup called UV Smart, which has developed an innovative solution based on UV light that helps disinfect medical instruments and devices within seconds. “We invested in UV Smart about 18 months ago, as we recognized that they have a great team and an advanced technology,” says Bo. 

As with all medical technologies, though, certification takes a long time and first revenues do not come in overnight. The current COVID-19 situation, however, has created an urgency for a solution like the one of UV Smart. “Normally they wouldn’t be selling yet, but due to the circumstances, they have had  their product medically certified last  month,” adds Bo, whose team has been advising the startup in the process. 

It is surely of great value for a young medtech company to have experienced advisors – with the right business and industry knowledge – supporting them. Especially in times of uncertainty. 

Blue Sparrows have found just the right niche to focus on. From here on out, they are looking to add new companies to their portfolio and later raise a second fund to continue investing in early-stage medtech startups. In the end, the only way to add value to the sector is to keep supporting its rising stars. 

The hospitality industry has taken a hit over the past months, with the COVID-19 outbreak keeping restaurants, bars and cafes closed. Opening up again, while impatiently awaited, may turn out to be a slow start for many of those businesses. Urbandine, a YES!Delft startup, has developed an intelligent mobile ordering and payment platform that allows customers to order and pay directly through their smartphone. This is hospitality solution that can make work at 1.5m distance that much easier. 

FROM A SIMPLE IDEA

Urbandine is the brainchild of Jaikishen Jayesingha, Jay for short, and Bhagya Goonewardhane, two friends who first met in high school in Sri Lanka. While they have known each other for over 13 years, they have not walked the same paths. After high school, they each pursued their own interests – Jay went to the UK to study Mechatronics, while Bhagya made his way to Singapore for a degree in Biomedical Engineering. 

While in Singapore, Bhagya made his first steps in the hospitality solution industry by working on a food discovery platform. He wrote more than 350 for the platform’s blog until it was acquired by the Uber equivalent of the region. By writing all those reviews, Bhagya learned a fair bit about the inefficiencies of how restaurants operate, especially when it came to customer experience. 

He knew that technology could improve customer experience and started looking into mobile ordering as a way to do that. Around the same time, he reconnected with Jay and found out that his friend, too, was thinking of starting a business along the same lines. They joined forces and laid the foundation of Urbandine. 

“We started out by developing a solution that would allow customers to order and pay at restaurants directly from their mobile phones. At the same time, we were also doing market research and we looked at Singapore as a possible entry market,” says Bhagya. Yet, with some competition already there, they quickly changed course and turned their eyes to Europe. “We had both been to the Netherlands for leisure and had noticed that there were always a lot of vacancies for restaurant or cafe personnel. We thought this might be a good place to start, as there is certainly a product-market fit.”  

What also tipped the scales towards choosing the Netherlands were the possibilities that it offered to non-EU entrepreneurs. Jay flew in in late 2018 to meet several facilitators who could help them apply for the Startup Visa. YES!Delft was one of them. 

In proving that they can add business value to the Dutch market, Jay and Bhagya applied for YES!Delft’s Blockchain/AI Validation Lab, sailed through their Selection Day and joined the program in early 2019. The rest is history.

THROUGH YES!DELFT

The Validation Lab turned out to be exactly what Jay and Bhagya needed to establish their solution on the European market. “During the 10-week program, we got to meet with over 60 restaurant owners and validate the need for our product,” Jay says. “We quickly identified beach clubs as a potential market segment, as they often have large terraces that are difficult for waiting staff to service at all times. We ran a pilot with two beach clubs in Scheveningen, starting in August 2019, and managed to bring in new revenue lines for them.” 

While beach clubs rely on customers to sit down and order at their location, with Urbandine they could also get orders from people on the beach, thus getting a boost in sales. This finding proved to Jay, Bhagya and restaurant owners alike that there is unexplored value to be derived from a solution like Urbandine. 

Still, having only beach clubs as customers was not going to be enough to run a self-sufficient company. It is a seasonal business and the two co-founders knew that rather well. 

TO A GROWING COMPANY

Between the end of the season for beach clubs, which is around October, until February 2020, Urbandine made itself known in a different market segment. “We offered our technology for use at events and made it possible for visitors to order food and drinks from a number of different vendors,” Bhagya says. 

One of those events was Horecava, the largest annual hospitality trade fair in the Netherlands. For the vendors at the event, having Urbandine as the solution to order food and drinks meant more business, while for the event organisers, it meant more interaction on the floor. 

For Urbandine, the buzz generated by this move was crucial. It was an opportunity for them to have restaurant owners, who were the key target audience of the event, experience their solution from the other side of the table, as the customer. “The feedback we got was invaluable,” Jay says.

It would only be fair to say that Jay and Bhagya have made leaps of progress since they first moved to the Netherlands just over a year ago. They have also secured a convertible loan of 100,000 euros from six Dutch investors and UK-based entrepreneur Agash Navaranjan, who has since joined Urbandine as co-founder and CTO.

To keep growing at the same, and an even higher pace, the team needed to kick 2020 off strong. For one, they wanted to make sure that they open the season together with terraces in the Netherlands. Yet, nobody could have predicted a global pandemic slowing them down as it did. 

“March has been quite dormant for us, but that doesn’t mean that we have not been working on our proposition,” Jay says. “We have stayed in close contact with our customers and are jointly looking for ways to restart operations once the current measures have been lifted.” 

“We want to offer Urbandine for two months for free to help restaurant and cafe owners to get back on their feet as quickly as possible,” Bhagya adds. “So far, restaurant owners have reported a loss of about 90% of revenues due to closing down their physical locations and they’ve had to cut ties with a lot of their flexible workforce. It is much harder to bring workers back than to let them go, so we want to help owners in this transition phase. We are preparing the restaurant market for a scenario where they would have to work with fewer waiting staff and keep 1.5m distance to their customers.” 

At the moment, the team is talking to more than 150 customers and is aiming to launch their solution with them as soon as the restrictions have been lifted. Urbandine wants to make it easier on restaurant, bar and cafe owners to do their job post-COVID-19, but they also want to establish themselves as the go-to solution for even better and more efficient customer service. 

Given their growth and business approach so far, even in difficult times, it is clear that Urbandine takes challenges in stride and turns them into opportunities. And it can only go up from here.

Milestones 

Jan 2019 – POC pilots in Sri Lanka 

February 2019 – Joined YES!Delft’s Blockchain/AI Validation Lab

June 2019 – MVP built and validation completed

July 2019  – 100K pre seed convertible loan secured

August 2019 – Beachhead market pilots at Beachclubs 

October 2019 – Joined YES!Delft’s Accelerator Program

October 2019 – Exhibited at CES Unveiled in Amsterdam

November 2019 – Agash Navaranjan joins Urbandine as co-founder and CTO

November 2019 – First trade show as partner – Strand Nederland Beurs

November 2019 – Selected to represent The Hague at Web Summit ALPHA AI stream

December 2019 – First flagship location – Stads Koffyhuis

January 2020 – Official launch of Urbandine at the Horecava Innovation Lab and Expo

February 2020 – Exhibited and partnered with HorecaBeurs trade show in Goes 

About a third of all food produced goes to waste, and more than 30% of that one third is lost before it reaches the supermarkets. This data may seem shocking, but what’s worse is that it’s real. The reason for this is that quality control with the products is often done by people and problems are not detected in time.

This doesn’t have to be the case, though. With their solution, the team of Mythronics makes it possible for vegetables and fruits to be graded and sorted autonomously, thus minimizing error and maximizing efficiency.

FROM A SIMPLE IDEA

For founder Soheil Jahanshahi, starting a business for the agricultural industry was not a hard decision. “When I was a kid, my father and my uncle had an apple farm back home in Iran, so agriculture has always been close to my heart,” he says. “In a time when people are moving more towards consumption of high quality fresh products, it is crucial that more and more fruits and vegetables (among others) reach the supermarkets in a good condition.”

The key to making that happen is by sorting and grading the product at the right time. Yet, in this specific industry segment, there has been – and still is – a shortage of qualified labor, Soheil says. Technology can fill this gap.

“From speaking to many (potential) clients, we found out that there are simply not enough people to do the job,” he explains. “Quite often, companies have to hire people from abroad and invest in training them, only to see them leave in a year. We want to avoid that.”

With a background in software engineering, Soheil knew that he could tackle this challenge and help decrease food waste in the value chain. With Mythronics, he and his team of three are developing solutions based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics that can: (1) detect when plants are ready for harvesting, (2) detect defects and other attributes in the product and (3) help with sorting it.

A simple idea that they have taken to the market in under two years.

THROUGH YES!DELFT

Soheil and his team are certainly up to something, with their ultimate goal to make AI more understandable and accessible to businesses in the agricultural industry. Naming the company Mythronics was also not a coincidence. “For many people, AI is still a myth and we want to change that,” Soheil says.

Supporting them along the way has been YES!Delft and their network of experts and mentors. Soheil joined the AI/Robotics Validation Lab in May 2018 and quickly learned about how to match his business proposition to the right target market.

“I met with a lot of potential clients, which helped me validate my idea and better understand the market I was aiming for,” says Soheil. “I also got exposure to a wide range of investors.” Only months later, Mythronics was accepted into YES!Delft’s Accelerator program.

TO A GROWING COMPANY

Today, the startup is already testing their product on several commercial solutions. The team is targeting two different market segments – greenhouse owners and growers on the one hand, and companies on the packaging and logistics side on the other.

For greenhouses, they have developed a mobile assistant that can autonomously detect problems with the crops. It can also tell them when certain crops are ready for harvesting, eliminating the need to train people for it.

On the logistics side, Mythronics has focused on developing an AI-driven solution that can help eliminate subjective quality inspections and ensure that all products are in the high quality sought after by supermarkets.

“We are building this product together with our customer, ABC Logistics,” says Soheil. “In essence, we’ve created a sorting box with sensors and an integrated technology that grades fruits. So you can put up to 60 different types of fruits on a conveyor belt, run them through the box, and it will identify each of them individually. As they go through the box, a robotic arm helps sort those fruits.”

In the relationship between the two companies, ABC Logistics has been providing a lot of the knowledge and a test site, while Soheil and his team have been bringing the technical expertise.

With two solutions already out for customers to work with, the team of Mythronics is well on their way to fulfilling their goal of reducing food waste, even if only on a local scale for now.

MILESTONES

2018

• Company established
• Accelerator Alumni at YES!Delft and RoboValley

2019

• Team grows to three people
• Received funding from Horizon 2020; pilot tests with first client

2020

• Development of Robotic Sorting machine
• Joined Startlife program from Wageningen