Yesterday, some of our successful incubator companies graduated

At this year’s graduation ceremony February 16, we honored our successful life science companies as they graduated from SmiLe’s incubator program. GPX Medical, Neki Sverige, Preactly, Thyrolytics and Viraspec are the five innovative companies that have completed different, but exciting, growth journeys in their quest to solve various health challenges.

Five more growing SmiLe companies, which have innovative solutions to some of society’s health and care challenges, are now graduating. They have completed SmiLe’s incubator program in 2020. The program has provided them with customized support from SmiLe’s business developers, who jointly possess over 300 years of experience from both small and large life science companies, as well as from additional experts in SmiLe’s international network. Several of the companies have also taken advantage of the unique laboratory environment that SmiLe offers. Since its inception, SmiLe has supported about 90 product and service companies in the field of health care; of these, an impressive nine of ten are still active.

The following companies graduated from SmiLe Incubator:

GPX Medical, which is based on research-intensive innovation from Lund University, may be the first to offer a non-invasive method for monitoring the lungs of premature infants. The company quickly developed in SmiLe’s incubator program and was listed on Nasdaq First North in the autumn in a ceremony for which the Nasdaq bell was moved to Lund for the first time to celebrate the start of the trading of shares. GPX took this step to be able to accelerate its growth.

Neki Sverige participated in SmiLe’s Bootcamp – SmiLe’s ten-week program for early healthtech companies, previously known as Health2B – followed by SmiLe’s incubator program. At first, Neki was product-oriented, but at SmiLe the company developed its strong growth concept, which entails acquisitions of other companies or projects in order to leverage synergies that arise between the company’s own e-health solutions and other products. Neki recently acquired the SmiLe incubator company POOW Application.

Preactly is a company that boosts management of employee well-being and motivation toward new virtual heights. The company’s interactive and virtual HR tool for a sustainable and health-promoting work environment is user-friendly, engages both employees and managers, and has already acquired several large organizations as customers. The tool is under constant development and the company, which was able to complete its commercialization journey while at SmiLe, is now beginning to hire a sales force.

Thyrolytics is developing a unique diagnostic method that could potentially diagnose thyroid-related diseases more specifically than current methods, thereby optimizing treatment while reducing side effects. This large group of patients is often over- or undertreated because current diagnostic methods are not sufficiently precise. The company’s test will be able to be carried out quickly and easily in outpatient settings such as primary care and specialist clinics. The underlying detection method is also revolutionary compared with current antibody-based tests. Thyrolytics has now been acquired by the Lund company Aegirbio.

Viraspec started in response to the sudden need for rapid COVID-19 tests, and was founded by a strong international team with prior commercial success with similar rapid tests. Even before the new test was ready, the company’s innovative technology had attracted considerable attention and the company was acquired by Ageirbio, where the test is now being further developed. This unique combination of innovations can make point-of-care screening tests faster, more reliable and less expensive.

“I feel great pride every time we have the opportunity to celebrate these outstanding entrepreneurs and fine companies that will be able to help make life much better for so many people. At SmiLe, we want to share our experience of developing companies – and the opportunities they need – with the incubator companies to enable them to develop into companies that can attract investors so that they can accelerate their growth,” says Ebba Fåhraeus, CEO of SmiLe Incubator.

 

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

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