Four Dutch founders in Kairos 50 list of top global entrepreneurs
5 March, 2021 by
Four Dutch founders in Kairos 50 list of top global entrepreneurs
Administrator
| No comments yet


Dutch startups are doing well on the world stage: four of them are included in the prestigious Kairos 50 list. These startups are Adjuvo Motion, AVA, Dutch UAS and Printr.

Each year, Kairos Society selects the 50 most promising companies worldwide with a (co)founder younger than 25 years old. The San Francisco-based organization supports the development of entrepreneurs worldwide. Entrepreneurs and innovators get the support of respectable mentors such as Peter Diamandis, Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton.

Selection criteria

The companies in the Kairos 50 were selected based on the feasibility of their vision and on their potential for industry disruption, for example in education or healthcare. A new criterion was that each company on the list needed to have either a finished product or a prototype. And Kairos Society was looking for (co)founders with “a bit of delusional optimism”, according to CEO Alex Fiance.

The four Dutch startups get the chance to show themselves at Kairos Global Summit in Hollywood, California on 13th of October. They can win free services and cash prizes, such as a $50.000 note from the venture capital firm of Twitter co-founder Ev Williams.

Dutch startups

Last year, one Dutch startup was selected for the prestigious list: Bird Control Group. This year, the score is even better with four Dutch startups, which are (in alphabetic order):

Adjuvo Motion

Adjuvo Motion (Gijs den Butter) aims to minimalize the problem that people who recover from a stroke in outpatient clinics don’t get enough therapy. Therefore, they have developed a robotic brace and an e-health service. Patients can take the brace to their homes and can practice movements with a family member or caregiver. All the movements are supported and measured by the brace, which helps the therapist to accelerate the treatment process. This form of therapy enables patients to train more frequently. Training also becomes more enjoyable, since it’s paired to a computer game.

AVA

AVA (Pieter Doevendans) is a mobile app for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. It enables them to follow conversations in groups, which is more difficult than one-on-one conversations, because lip-reading of several persons at the same time is (almost) impossible. The app receives the words of all the conversation partners and converts these real time into text. The text of each person gets a different colour, so it is easy to see who said what. The basis of this app is a system that connects the microphones of all devices using the app, so different persons can be distinguished.

Dutch UAS

Dutch UAS (Camiel Verschoor) offers automated software to map large nature reservations making use of drones. The startup participates in a project to save the rhino from poaching. Dutch UAS has built a drone with thermographic cameras, which can automatically detect animals and humans. The images made by the cameras are sent to the rangers in real time. Therefore, rangers can see day and night what happens close to the rhinos, so they can protect the animals more effectively from poachers.

Printr

Cecile van der Waal is co-founder of Printr, which offers an operating system for 3D printers. Last Summer, Van der Waal won The Next Women pitch competition audience award. The operating system of Printr simplifies usage of 3D printers by reducing the required actions to just a few. This is much-needed, because more and more people buy a 3D printer for their own use and current operating systems are not very user-friendly. Printr sells its product to manufacturers of 3D printers, so the customer can buy a complete package of printer and operating system.

Sign in to leave a comment