SmiLe entrepreneurs named “business community hope of the future” 

Yesterday, nine young business people from eight SmiLe companies were named Skåne's main hope for the future of the business community in Sweden. Eric Öste won the regional SKAPA prize and, according to the news agency Rapidus, the eight others are among the 34 most promising young talents in Skåne’s business community. 

Eric Öste, who is CEO and founder of the biotech company Cirkulär, was one of the two winners of the regional SKALA Prize in the ”young innovators” category at a ceremony yesterday. The innovators included over 60 young people from Skåne. Eric Öste will now advance to the national finals, where he has the chance to win up to SEK 125,000 when the SKAPA Prize – Sweden’s largest  innovation prize, established in memory of Alfred Nobel – is awarded on November 11.  

The same evening, Skåne’s “34s” were presented – 34 of the most promising young talents up to a maximum age of 34 in Skåne's business community, as voted by the editorial team at the Rapidus news agency. Eight young SmiLe business people made the list. Three of them made the top five: Linn Wrangmark and Frida McCabe, who started the medtech company Medow, and Prudence Persson, who is developing Manje, a digital platform for specialist care in Africa. Others from SmiLe include Kushagr Punyani, who is responsible for the companies Spermosens and Diagonal Bio, both of which have been listed on Swedish trading venues; Filip Peters, who started Acorai and is developing an AI-based non-invasive monitor of intracardiac blood pressure;  Fábio Rosa, who is co-founder of Asgard Therapeutics and is developing novel cancer drugs, and Maximilian Ottosson together with Albin Jakobsson, who are two of the co-founders of Cellevate. 

“We are thrilled that so many young entrepreneurs at SmiLe have been recognized. Their innovative solutions are in high demand from both the healthcare industry and the market, and they are developing into dedicated entrepreneurs under the guidance of SmiLe Incubator coaches and experts. I am convinced that we will soon be hearing more news about them and their companies,” says Ebba Fåhraeus, CEO of SmiLe Incubator. 

 

For more information, please contact: Ebba Fåhraeus, CEO SmiLe Incubator,  +46 (0)73 4000433, ebba@smileincubator.life

 

About SKAPA: The SKAPA Prize is Sweden's largest innovation prize, with the aim of providing support for inventors so they can develop their ideas. SKAPA, a foundation that was established in memory of Alfred Nobel in 1985, awarded its first prize in 1986. The foundation is run by Stockholmsmässan (Stockholm International Fair) and Svenska Uppfinnareföreningen (Swedish Inventors' Association), with support from Almi Företagspartner AB, VINNOVA, the Agne Johansson Memorial Foundation and the Swedish Intellectual Property Office. In the Young Innovators category, a prize of SEK 10,000 and a final place were awarded to two young entrepreneurs on November 8. The final will be held on November 11. 

About Rapidus 34s: The editorial board of the Rapidus news agency scoured the business community for the most exciting names of the future and identified 34 talented people up to a maximum age of 34. They were presented at a live event at PwC on Monday, November 8. 

Information about the companies: 

Acorai – is redefining heart failure monitoring by enabling non-invasive intracardiac pressure monitoring to help reduce heart failure re-hospitalizations. 

Asgard Therapeutics – has the goal to establish direct cell reprogramming as an entirely new approach to unleash the immune system against cancer. 

Cellevate – has developed products for pre-clinic drug development where networks of nanofibers mimic different types of tissue.

Cirkulär – develops a platform to identify, design, create and scale filamentous fungal cells to produce sustainable, inexpensive, and high-quality proteins for the feed and food industry. 

Diagonal Bio – has developed rapid diagnostics for multi pathogen detection with high precision. The product, Panviral, is a simple one-step assay. 

Manje Health – is building a digital platform that simplifies healthcare by providing access to specialized medical services across Africa in just minutes. 

Medow – the company´s first product, IV-bracelet, is an easy-to-use bracelet to which intravenous tubes can be attached to keep them and the needle in place during various kinds of treatments.  

Spermosens – has developed Juno-Checked that diagnoses male-factor infertility to assist the clinician direct to the suitable IVF treatment. Conventional diagnostics fail to determine fertilization capacity of sperms. 

 

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