OktoberINVESTfest2018

The 7th annual Bavarian-American OktoberINVESTfest was a grand success last week in New York.  This investors’ conference hosted by Invest in Bavaria is built on the continuing theme of transatlantic investment and research collaboration between the U.S. and the German State of Bavaria, Europe’s economic and innovation powerhouse.

This year, presenting companies revealed their solutions for powering the Smart City and Smart Factory, where Mobility, Connectivity, Automation, Industry 4.0, and Digitalization play leading roles.  In the Medical Showcase, US innovators were joined by companies from Bavaria’s Medical Valley, BioM and the European Institute for Innovation and Technology for Health to present their MedTech, BioTech, and Digital Health innovations to question-posing medical experts.

All seats were taken when keynote speaker Micah Kotch, Managing Director of Urban-X, BMW-Mini’s urban-tech accelerator spoke about “creating solutions for a brighter urban life”.  Referring to the $100k that Urban-X invests in each accelerator participant, Kotch said “The money is nice but the real emphasis is on engagement with designers at Mini and engineers at BMW.”  BMW’s home state, Bavaria, is honored by EUROCITIES as a leader in smart city tech, with a completely digitized living lab district.

Presenting Bavarian company SanoLiBio with its fully automated platform used to isolate rare circulating tumor cells (CTC’s) took home 1st place in the OktoberINVESTfest Innovation Award.  Second place went to California based PowerSphyr, contributing to a connected world with its patented intelligent wireless charging solutions for the automotive, industrial and consumer markets. Inveox came in 3rd, with what they call Pathology 4.0, a complete rethinking of digital labs of the future that automates data and processes to prevent cancer misdiagnosis, and make labs more efficient. Ten days ago, Inveox won the highest award at the Bits & Pretzels, Founders Festival in Munich, and last week they were honored again at OktoberINVESTfest!

Jan Danisman, Executive Director of the Bavarian US Offices in New York said, “Startups looking for opportunities in Europe are flocking to join three major initiatives which Bavaria offers to US Startups:  participating in our east-west conferences:  like last week’s OktoberINVESTfest in New York and the Maifest in San Francisco, being part of our unique expansion program, Accelerate2Europe and actually going to Bavaria for a custom planned tour of our booming startup scene, complete with valuable introductions, informative meetings, facility tours, site visits and of course some Bavarian culture. Thank you to all who joined us last week and we look forward to welcoming you soon to Bavaria!”