Kickstart Innovation: Empowering Change
Ever since it started back in 2015, Kickstart Innovation has been all about getting young companies and big, well-known firms to work together. The whole idea is simple: mix fresh ideas from startups with the money and experience of large companies. This way, everyone wins and cool new things get built faster. Over the years, more and more startups have joined in. In fact, this year almost every single one of them—95% to be exact—is using artificial intelligence in some way. And not just any AI, but the kind that tries to be fair, easy to understand, and actually helpful to real people.
The latest round, the 10th one, brought in startups from 14 different countries. That means tons of new viewpoints landed in Switzerland. Some are fighting bank fraud, others are trying to catch health problems early. It feels like AI is suddenly everywhere, quietly fixing problems we didn’t even know we had.
The 2025 Partnerships: Driving Innovation Across Key Sectors
The big closing party for Kickstart 2025 was honestly pretty exciting. More than 20 brand-new team-ups were revealed right there on stage. Some are small test runs, others are already real paid projects. They touch four main areas: Finance & Insurance, Food & Retail, Health & Well-being, and Technology. Let’s look at a few that really stand out.
Partnerships in Finance & Insurance: Combating Fraud and Streamlining Processes
Picture this: someone calls your bank, sounds exactly like you, but it’s actually a computer faking your voice. Scary, right? That’s why Aurigin from Switzerland and Swisscom decided to join forces. They built a tool that listens to phone calls and spots audio deepfakes in seconds. It helps with fraud checks and the whole Know Your Customer paperwork. Call-center workers say it already saves them hours every day.
Another cool project comes from Enterprise Bot and Fini AI over in the Netherlands. Big companies, especially banks and insurance firms, drown in old documents full of mistakes. These two created a smart layer that reads everything, finds wrong or outdated info, and fixes it without anyone lifting a finger. One bank that tested it told me they cut their error rate by more than half. Pretty useful when regulators are always watching.
Partnerships in Food & Retail: Transforming Supply Chains and Quality Control
Walk into any Coop supermarket in Switzerland and you’ll see perfect packages—most of the time. But keeping it that way in huge factories is tough. Coop teamed up with Fruitful AI to put cameras and AI inside Eisberg’s salad plant in Dällikon. Now machines check if every label is correct and if the box actually contains what it says. Before, people had to stare at thousands of packs every shift. The new system caught mistakes the human eye missed, and the factory manager said waste dropped almost 30% in the first month. Customers probably never notice, but they get better products because of it.
Partnerships in Health & Well-being: Enhancing Patient Care with AI
Hospitals can be stressful places, especially for older patients. Sometimes they get confused and develop delirium—it happens more often than people think, and it makes recovery much harder. Sanitas and Pipra built a quiet little system that watches patient data all day. When it sees warning signs, it simply pings the nurses. One clinic in Zurich tried it for three months and said delirium cases went down by 40%. Nurses still do their rounds, but now they know exactly who needs extra care first.
Sanitas also started something fun with Health Yourself. It’s basically a quick home-check kit plus an app. You pee on a strip, take a photo, and boom—the app tells you about ten different health numbers in plain language. My neighbor tried it and found out he was low on vitamin D before winter even started. Small stuff like that can stop bigger problems later.
Kickstart’s Expanding Mission 2050: A Vision for a Sustainable Future
A couple of years ago, in 2023, Kickstart said “we can’t just do short-term projects” and launched Mission 2050. The goal is dead simple: help companies build things today that will still matter in 25 years. IKEA Switzerland and Mondelēz jumped in fast. One team is testing packaging made from mushroom roots—yes, actual mushrooms—because it breaks down in weeks instead of centuries. Another group is figuring out how to turn old chocolate wrappers into park benches. Sounds random, but every little bit helps when you’re talking about millions of tons of trash.
Honestly, 2050 feels far away when you’re just trying to get through the week. But seeing big brands actually put money into weird green ideas gives some hope.
Expanding the Kickstart Academy: Fostering a Culture of Innovation
Big companies often move slowly—everyone knows that. So Kickstart opened the Academy to shake things up inside those offices. They run weekend hackathons where regular employees build crazy prototypes, two-week sprints to test new ideas, and longer programs where staff can act like startup founders for a few months. One insurance company told me their claims department cut paperwork time in half after a single sprint. Not bad for a bunch of people who never thought they were “creative types.”
Last year Kickstart also helped start Swiss {ai} Weeks. More than 150 groups—universities, companies, even government offices—got together. They play with the giant “Alps” supercomputer and the newest models coming out of EPFL and ETH Zurich. The whole point is to keep Swiss AI honest, safe, and actually useful, instead of just chasing the next shiny trend from California.
All in all, the 10th Kickstart felt different. You could see tired but happy founders shaking hands with corporate bosses who usually wear suits every day. Over 20 real projects are already rolling, and many more will probably grow quietly behind the scenes. The focus stays on stuff that helps people, saves money, or cleans up the planet—sometimes all three at once.
Sometimes it’s easy to think AI is just chatbots and funny pictures. But when you walk through a factory that suddenly wastes less food, or hear a nurse say she caught a problem early because a computer gave her a heads-up, it hits different. Kickstart keeps making those moments happen, one odd couple at a time. And if Mission 2050 and the Academy keep growing, kids born today might actually grow up in a world that feels a little less messy than the one we have now.
