🎉 Big congratulations to Sealed Cycle and founders Thomas Voets and Hans Koene! 🎉
Sealed Cycle develops AI-powered solutions to reduce waste. Their flagship product, Waste Assist, combines a camera, AI, and a smart light bar to guide users in real-time on how to correctly separate waste. Designed for schools, hospitals, and offices, it helps organisations reach sustainability goals and cut disposal costs. Thanks to its magnetic mount, Waste Assist can be easily attached to any bin—making waste sorting effortless, flexible, and efficient.

👏 A huge shoutout to the other inspiring Utrecht innovators, including two UtrechtInc graduates:

💡 Faqta – A learning platform that helps teachers and schools connect subjects within a unified curriculum.
💡 BikeFlip – A circular subscription service for children’s bikes with delivery, exchange, and repair included.
💡 Radarxense BV – Builds low-power radar systems offering complete solutions from design to implementation.
💡 RheoLight (Ink Invent) – Creates glass-based additives for paints that enhance night-time visibility through retroreflection.
💡 Leermaatje – An AI-driven reading platform helping primary school children improve their reading skills with personalised content.
💡 Kairos Furniture – Designs durable, modular sofas produced locally with social partners, promoting circular furniture design.
💡 Delta21 – A multifunctional concept for the southwestern delta, combining water safety, energy storage, and nature restoration.
💡 Smart Fire Technologies BV – Ensures fire safety for lithium-ion battery systems through expert advice and wireless detection tech.
💡 Withthegrid – Builds technology for a connected, resilient energy infrastructure via its Teleport Gateway and Asset Monitoring Platform.
💡 MaGie Creations – Turns brewers’ grain, a major by-product, into food ingredients—keeping nutrition in the human food chain.

And of course, congrats to all the other amazing innovators who made this year’s list! 🚀

👉 Read the full KvK Innovation Top 100 here:https://www.kvkinnovatietop100.nl/site/home

📸 SPCTR on the cover of ON Media – Uitgever van OnderNamen!

This week, SPCTR had the honour of being featured on the cover of Ondernamen magazine, in collaboration with Rabobank. The article highlights the team’s journey — from an idea conceived at the kitchen table to the thriving company it has become today.

SPCTR also attended the magazine’s launch event, celebrating this milestone alongside fellow innovators and entrepreneurs from the region.

Congratulations from UtrechtInc!

👉 Read the article : https://ondernamen.nl/lopikerwaard/herfst-2025/van-idee-aan-de-keukentafel-naar-baanbrekende-zorginnovatie/

 

We are thrilled to announce that Julia Berezutskaya,  at UMC Utrecht, and her team have won the Ureka Mega Challenge 2025 with their groundbbreaking idea: UCANACT (formerly known as Alphabet).

UCANACT is one of the pioneering startups in our innovation community. It offers a digital solution designed to help individuals suffering from locked-in syndrome-often caused by conditions such as ALS, CVA (stroke), or MS. By translating complex brain signals into meaningful words, sentences, and commands, UCANACT empowers patients with severely limited communication to reconnect with the world around them.

We are incredibly proud to support Julia and her team in their mission to restore communication where it matters most.

Shoutout to the Finalists
We’d also like to recognize the other incredible teams that made it to the final round of the 11th Ureka Mega Challenge, including two more startups from our community:

Arie Jan (Arjan) Stoppelenburg – Team Tolvac Therapeutics
Sebas Pronk & Irati Beltrán Hernández – Team Lumox
Wouter van Dort – Team VIDEOFLOW

 

Innovation like this drives progress in healthcare – congratulations to all the finalists!

👉 Read more about: https://www.umcutrecht.nl/nieuws/communiceren-ondanks-locked-in-syndroom

 

For stroke patients, every second counts. ⏰ Getting to the right hospital for the right treatment as fast as possible can mean the difference between a full recovery and a life-changing disability.

Currently, millions of severe stroke patients are taken to hospitals that can’t provide the specialized treatment they need. This results in a delay of up to 90 minutes, leading to worse outcomes and a greater burden on society.

TrianecT has developed a device that combines brain activity measurement and AI to detect severe stroke in the ambulance. By identifying these patients on the spot, they ensure that patients are taken directly to a hospital that can provide the right care.

That’s why we’re so excited to share two incredible milestones for TrianecT:
First, they’ve successfully raised €1.35M in their first-ever funding round! 🎉
Second, their collaborative research with Amsterdam UMC has been honored with the Valorisation Award 2025! 🏆

This recognition celebrates the power of partnership between academia and industry, turning research into life-saving solutions.

Congrats Wouter Potters, Maryse van ‘t Klooster, Linda Loosveld Henk Marquering, Simon van Bezooijen, Coenraad Tamse

Learn more about their exciting news:https://trianect.com/news/xo-ventures-and-cbusinez-invest-eur135-million-in-trianect-to-accelerate-stroke-detection-in-ambulances

Big news for BeephoniX: the startup is now collaborating with the Ministry of Defence. The Land Forces Command’s Innovation Department, which drives cutting-edge projects, is supporting BeephoniX’s breakthrough technology

The company has developed a microphone system capable of detecting and identifying drones—using an innovative approach inspired by the hearing system of honey bees. This partnership marks a major step forward for BeephoniX and its technology.

Learn more about their exciting news: https://magazines.defensie.nl/landmacht/2025/07/05_innovatie-akoestische-sensor

⚡ Spotlight: Spotlight on Learned: AI-Powered Performance Reviews

 
Learned is an HR platform that leverages AI to automate the entire evaluation process and support managers. Instead of time-consuming, subjective, and often ineffective review cycles, Learned enables organizations to conduct objective, meaningful conversations that directly drive performance, development, and retention.

The platform automatically captures interim feedback where it naturally occurs—through email, Slack, Teams, or one-on-one meetings. AI then summarizes this input into well-founded evaluations, saving managers and HR hundreds of hours annually while improving the quality of leadership and conversations.
For managers, this means greater confidence and control in their role. With practical guidance and AI coaching, they can handle even the most difficult discussions independently and constructively.
Learned provides a uniform process, full transparency, and actionable insights, enabling HR to take on a stronger strategic role with the leadership team.

What sets Learned apart is its focus on empowering leadership rather than replacing it. By combining objective data, skill-based role profiles, and AI-driven support, evaluations become fairer, employees gain visibility into their growth, and organizations foster a culture of continuous learning and performance.

” The incubator program provides guidance and practical tips at the start on how to structure different parts of your business. They also help you connect with networks of advisors—one of our very first investors actually came from there. Special thanks to former Managing Director Jorg Kop, who also supported us in other investment processes.”

 

 

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:

• Optimize their positioning from the early concept
• Save months on time to market for their next innovation
• Avoid costly rework and product holds due to compliance issues

 

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:

• Patients benefit from having access to more advanced diagnostic and therapy options
• Healthcare providers benefit from solutions that reduce the burden on clinical teams and can provide more options to patients
• Payers benefit from being reducing costs through solutions that allow for more efficient care delivery (reduce burden on clinical teams, earlier diagnosis and treatment leading to lower follow-up costs, …)
• The health tech industry benefits from faster time to market at lower cost

 

Follow their journey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/guideways/?originalSubdomain=nl