Four Innogrants to transform agriculture, safety, and health

Apolarion: Clean seed sterilization with cold plasma

Apolarion's Innogrant sponsored by UBS as part of their ongoing commitment to fostering innovation and driving positive societal change.

Seed-borne diseases (such as blight, fungal infections, and moulds) pose a major threat to agriculture and are known to severely reduce crop yields. Today, farmers rely on steam treatments or chemical coatings to protect their seeds. While effective, these methods are costly, resource-intensive, and can leave chemical residues that damage soil health.

The team at Apolarion – working with Professor Ivo Furno in the Swiss Plasma Centre – are developing a small, modular device that uses Cold Atmospheric Plasma (CAP) to sterilise seeds without heat or chemicals. CAPs contain an electrically generated mix of reactive molecules from air that destroy pathogens and disinfect seeds at room temperature and pressure. This clean alternative to steam or pesticide-based treatments preserves soil health while maintaining high germination rates.

The team will use their UBS-sponsored Innogrant to further develop their prototype, complete biological validation, and deploy their first pilot with Swiss industrial partners.

Contacts: Luke Simons and Jesús Poley

Raven Intelligent Systems: autonomous inspections for safer worksites

Industrial worksites – construction zones, oil and gas facilities, manufacturing plants – remain some of the most dangerous environments in Europe. In 2021, there were more than 3,000 fatal and nearly 3 million non-fatal workplace accidents. The financial – and human – impact is enormous and many incidents could be prevented through more frequent, accurate and well-documented safety checks.

Raven Intelligent Systems – a startup based in Professor Alcherio Martinoli’s Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Lab (DISAL) – is developing InspectNet to help businesses reduce the risk of onsite injury and downtime. Their end-to-end automated inspection platform uses ultra-lightweight autonomous drones and AI-powered analysis to identify hazards in real time, generating objective, fast and actionable alerts and reports for worksite safety teams.

The Startup Launchpad Innogrant will help the team refining their hazard-detection software and prepare InspectNet for its first pilot deployment.

Contacts: Kağan Erünsal and Lucas Waelti

GERMION Therapeutics: a new class of antibiotics to outsmart resistant bacteria

Antimicrobial resistance threatens to cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050. Current antibiotics are failing, and few new classes have reached the clinic for decades. Active development either focuses on optimisation of the already-available scaffolds (susceptible to resistance due to the share mechanisms) or in complex and expensive solutions (e.g. phage therapy).

Stemming out of EPFL, and with the support of an international team of collaborators, Germion’s solution addresses this urgent and rising need by developing a simple and novel class of metalloid-based antibiotics in an unexplored chemical space, and that display a unique mechanism of action, offering an alternative where current therapies are failing.

After securing an Ignition Grant in early 2025 to advance testing and protect their discoveries, GERMION Therapeutics now moves to the next stage with a FIT-Innogrant. This funding will support the team’s efforts in in vivo de-risking, developing a second generation of antibiotics active against Gram-negative pathogens, and building clinical, regulatory, and IP roadmaps -paving the way for company incorporation and investor readiness.

Contact: Dr Jan Romano-deGea

Obstetrical Care Solutions (OCS): real-time 3D visualization for safer childbirth

For decades, birth assistance has relied mainly on manual examination and the practitioner’s mental reconstruction of maternal and foetal anatomy. Although ultrasound is now standard in delivery rooms, it offers only limited, cross-sectional views.

OCS introduces a real-time 3D visualization system for assessment of childbirth biomechanics. This technology displays the pelvic bone, foetal head and, when relevant, obstetric instruments, providing a standardized framework for navigating complex deliveries and improving clinical consistency and patient care. Developed at EPFL and CHUV, the add-on to ultrasound devices integrates an optical tracking system with AI-driven 3D modelling and can incorporate tracked tools for guided procedures.

Obstetrical Care Solutions (OCS) is supported by a FIT-Innogrant, which will enable the team to refine the prototype, conduct pre-clinical studies to validate its performance, and lead fundraising efforts to advance toward clinical trials.

Contacts: Sandra Marcadent and Johann Hêches