NeuroTidal has joined the BioTechBooster program! 🎉 This support will help them to accelerate their mission to build objective diagnostics for Parkinson’s disease: tools that can speed therapy development and help patients get the right care sooner. The team ( Françoise Dekker, Pleun van Veghel and Stefan Rüdiger) may have already celebrated the news with some bubbles 🍾 🥂
#Trainer spotlight: Leon Pals 🚀
Leon Pals has helped make the Lean Startup method popular in Europe through his workshops and Startup Academy programs. Today, he also works as a validation expert for Rabobank and the European Union.
He’s great at helping early-stage founders with validation, customer development, and building communities. Leon really knows how to help a team figure out what works and what doesn’t. It was a real pleasure having Leon Pals run many (more than 15!) sessions and 1-1 coaching for UtrechtInc validation programs. 🤝
Leon’s expertise is in validation, customer development, and community building. He mainly works with early-stage B2C startups, but he also has experience with B2B companies and those with funding. His skills are best for projects that have market risk in particular.
A big thank you to Leon for sharing his expertise and for helping our entrepreneurs make progress! 🙏
✨Spotlight: Guideways – Automating regulatory, quality management, and reimbursement with AI
What if health technology could move at the speed of discovery?
Guideways is making it happen. Their AI agents take on the time-consuming work of regulatory approval, compliance, and reimbursement so innovators can focus on building healthcare breakthroughs.
“The faster the process, the sooner patients benefit”
Founded in 2025 by Alexander Habermeier and Sander Denissen, Guideways specializes in supporting medical devices and software in the United States (FDA) and Europe (EU MDR).
‘’Guideways was born from the personal experiences of Sander and I’’
Alexander brings 16 years of experience in health tech innovation. After starting his career at a pioneering surgical robotics startup, he went on to develop, launch, and scale breakthrough devices across orthopedics, neuro, and cardiovascular fields at startups, scale-ups, and large medtech companies.
“My mission has consistently been to bring breakthrough innovations to patients,”
Sander contributes 20 years of experience in health tech. Fascinated by technology from a young age, he built his career at Philips, taking on roles as software architect, system architect, and engineering team lead, working on first-in-class innovations in image-guided therapy. His background is in machine learning and AI.
The idea for Guideways grew from Alexander and Sander’s shared experiences.
“We realized that approval, compliance, and reimbursement are often the biggest bottlenecks preventing innovations from reaching the market,”
“With AI, we are working to remove these barriers so the health technology ecosystem can deliver more life-saving solutions to patients.”
What inspired you to focus on automating regulatory, quality management, and reimbursement instead of other parts of the healthcare innovation process?
Sander and I have extensive experience bringing breakthrough innovations from just a concept to patients. Through that experience across both the technical and business side, we have come to realize that these processes often are the major bottleneck preventing innovations from reaching patients.
It’s much too complex, much too slow and much too expensive, leading to the following issues:
Time-consuming: Long, multi-year timelines for regulatory approval. It takes 31-66 months to go from medical proven concept to approval depending on the risk profile.
Costly: Prohibitive investment is required. 30 to 75 % of development costs from working medical device concepts to market are related to regulatory activities.
Inefficient: The process is complex, leading to a lot of mistakes and delays. 1/3 of applications are rejected outright, 2/3 of the remaining require re-work.
As we experienced these issues again in our respective projects in 2024, me on FDA approval, Sander on EU MDR, we stepped back and realized that there has to be a better way. This is how Guideways was born!
How does Guideways’ AI adapt to different international regulations like FDA and EU MDR without slowing down approvals?
We develop deep AI agents that are specialized in streamlining the process for medtech / healthtech innovators to get approval, remain compliant and gain reimbursement.
The Guideways agents have in-depth knowledge of the regulation, guidelines and standards as well as data from the devices already approved. As an example, our FDA approval strategy agent uses more than 100k reference documents!
Our AI agents help customers throughout the process, enabling them to start from just a few lines of description of their medical device or software. The agent then guides them step by step, analysing the applicable requirements in a way that is tailored to each specific innovation as an expert would.
As a result, innovators benefit from faster time to market at lower cost because they can:
What kind of impact do you expect this technology to have on how quickly patients can access new treatments in the next five years?
Our mission is to get 10 times more health technology innovation to patients. Our AI agents do that by accelerating the approval, compliance and reimbursement processes because they can do weeks of work in just minutes and remove expertise bottlenecks preventing innovations to get to market. This benefits the whole ecosystem:
Follow their journey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/guideways/?originalSubdomain=nl
Forget the robots taking over, we’ve got five startups from our ecosystem proving that AI is here to make a real impact!
💡 Alphabet
Helping hundreds of thousands with paralysis communicate, use technology, and control their environment.
Founded by Julia Berezutskaya
💡 Yasu
AI Cloud Engineer that prevents waste across AWS, GCP & Azure cloud platforms.
Founded by Vikram Das & John in ‘t Hout
💡 Guideways AI
Develops AI agents that automate regulatory approval, reimbursement planning and QMS management for health tech companies.
Founded by Alexander Habermeier & Sander Denissen
💡 Bosun.ai
A platform for AI agents to write, document and make improvements in your codebase.
Founded by Tinco Andringa & Timon Vonk
💡 Lont
Full-stack platform for personalized video at scale, combining AI and proven technologies to automate content creation and delivery.
Founded by Ruud van der Linden & Ismael Garrido
Would you like to join our ecosystem? Find more about our programs.
We celebrated with Daniel Burger, Founder of Eightsix Science, on successfully closing their pre-seed round, with legendary investor Tim Draper leading the way. This funding will help Eightsix Science in its mission to revolutionize life extension through its innovative Ectopic Cognitive Preservation (ECP) approach. This is a significant step forward for a startup aiming to tackle one of humanity’s biggest challenge: death.
Daniel, Founder & Neuroengineer (MSc Applied Neuroscience, King’s College London, EPFL, Blue Brain Project), teamed up with Michel Wälti, Neuroscientist (PhD Neuroscience, ETH Zürich, IDUN Tech), Mahmut Yüksel, Physician in Neurology (MD, MHBA, University Clinic Zurich, Harvard, EPFL), and an advisory board that includes experts in neurosurgery, ethics, tissue engineering, and in vivo research from Cambridge University, the University of Tokyo, Imperial College, and the UMC.
Cordys Analytics have officially reached two key regulatory milestones:
ISO 13485 certification, demonstrating that their quality management system meets the highest international standards for medical devices.
MDR certification, confirming that their Galvo™ ECG analysis platform complies with the EU Medical Device Regulation, one of the world’s strictest frameworks.
Their notified body, TÜV SÜD, has just confirmed these achievements. This represents a significant advancement for their team and technology.
With the Galvo™ 12L ECG analysis platform now fully certified, they are moving into the next stage: real-world clinical validation and commercialization.
Appreciation goes to their dedicated team, investors, and partners who helped make this possible.
🌦️ Spotlight on Weather Forecasting: Beyond Weather
Say goodbye to uncertainty in long-range weather forecasts. Beyond Weather is tackling the so-called “prediction desert” by delivering actionable, weeks-ahead insights powered by AI and climate science. Whether you’re managing a farm, a city, or an energy grid, early warnings can change everything.
🔍 Why Beyond Weather matters
🧠 Meet the Team
Spun out of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the founding team at Beyond Weather includes Steven van den Tol, Jannes van Ingen, Sem Vijverberg, and Dim Coumou. Together, they bring deep scientific expertise into the startup world. Steven has played a key role in shaping a team culture where shared values and regular feedback are part of the foundation. This deliberate approach helps turn cutting-edge research into a focused and mission-driven company.
Joining a startup like Beyond Weather means contributing to the culture of the company. What kind of team environment do you as a co-founder thrive in, and how do you see yourself contributing to a positive and productive culture in a growing company spun out of academic research?
We believe good company culture is extremely important, especially in the early stages. Believes shape values, values shape behaviour, behaviour shapes culture and culture shapes performance. We hold a strong belief that work shouldn’t always be crazy and that people only thrive when they feel supported and valued. That feeling translates into healthy culture, which will make a better team and higher performance. As an academic spin-off we will in a way always stay true to our academic roots, but we have also created our own culture on top of that. Steven has been one of the most influential people in deliberately shaping company culture by setting up repeated processes of feedback within the founding team and for new hires.
Beyond Weather gives specific forecasts for industries like energy and commodities. How would you make complex scientific data easy for these clients to understand and use?
The beauty of weather is that every single human on earth experiences it and there is no way around it. That already makes it quite understandable for most people we work with. Still, weather can indeed be a complex phenomenon that needs further explanation. In that case, it’s the same as in every other field of work: take a customer point-of-view to explain your own product. Often times it’s not about knowing what the weather will be, but about what the weather will do. Making that translation for the customer can be highly valuable.
Beyond Weather helps predict extreme weather months ahead, filling a “prediction desert.” How would you explain, in simple terms, how this early warning helps people like farmers, city planners, or aid groups save money, resources, and even lives?
The prediction desert is a beautiful storyline that visualises a gap in weather forecast accuracy. On the short-range end of the forecasting horizon – up to 14 days – weather forecasting is quite accurate. Over the last decades, tremendous steps have been made to increase weather forecasting here. On the other far end, the realm of climate projections – years to decades ahead – also have quite accurate predictions based on CO2 content in the atmosphere. Right in between those is where the prediction desert lives. Beyond two weeks ahead, weather forecast accuracy has always been low. The resulting weather insecurity has always been a big problem for many economic sectors, because it decreases the power to anticipate. Luckily, with the power of AI, new opportunities arise to beat this forecasting horizon. We believe this oasis in the prediction desert is the early warning many people need for their business; a farmer who tries to protect his harvest, energy companies that need to optimise renewable energy, NGOs that need to allocate help in areas of the world, water management bodies that anticipate droughts.
Learn more about their journey & mission
✨ Introducing SOVN: A solution for teeth grinding and clenching!
SOVN is changing how we approach sleep, offering a smart solution for teeth grinding and clenching (bruxism), a widespread issue affecting many.
🚀 Why SOVN matters:
Meet the dedicated minds behind SOVN: a purpose-driven team committed to using their skills to help millions sleep better. They’re building a future where everyone wakes up feeling refreshed.
How did the spark of innovation for SOVN come about and how has that initial vision evolved as you’ve faced the early challenges and insights from your market?
The inspiration came from my personal struggle with teeth grinding and clenching during sleep. My co-founder and I began with the question: “Can we develop a technology that detects and disrupts these episodes?” The core vision of delivering better sleep is still the same, but our approach has evolved as we learned from our multiple iterations and from our customers. Our focus has shifted to not only providing a product that intervenes during sleep but also offering valuable insights that help users identify and change personal triggers and habits that contribute to teeth grinding and clenching. By providing this type of holistic solution, we empower users to achieve lasting improvements in their sleep and overall well-being.
Looking ahead, what technological leaps or breakthroughs do you dream of achieving to fundamentally reshape the future of sleep health?
We are imagining a personalized sleep “system” that delivers tailored stimuli to optimize each individual’s sleep. It might sound a bit like science fiction, but imagine a system that can optimize your key sensory experiences – light, sound, temperature – so you wake up always refreshed. We think the components are there, but we need to connect the ecosystem and adjust their settings specific to individual’s sleep requirements and responses to stimuli.
If you could fast-forward ten years, what does the world look like because SOVN exists, and what would your dream team be?
Learn more about their journey & missionIn ten years, we hope that we’ve helped millions of people achieve better sleep. As for the team, we believe the dream team is a group of purpose-driven individuals who are passionate about using their talents and skills to further our mission to help millions sleep better. And in that sense, we feel we already have the dream team, though we’re always open to growing our team. So if you’re a sleep tech nerd, come and join us!
It’s great to hear that Clear2Cure has successfully raised €380,000 from angel investors. They’re putting the money into securing their intellectual property around the world and speeding up preclinical development, which are key steps for future discoveries. It’s nice to see them acknowledge Daan Van der Vorm (SHAPE Capital BV), Hol Treasury, and Stam Capital for their support. Congrats Jord Stam and Jasper van Berkel.
Trianect has recently secured a €1.35 million investment from XO Ventures and CbusineZ! This capital injection will accelerate the development and market launch of StrokePointer™, a portable device designed to assess stroke severity directly in ambulances, enabling earlier and more informed treatment decisions that can dramatically improve patient outcomes. Congrats Wouter Potters and Henk Marquering.