Five Innovative Startups Passed Through Bayer’s Accelerator in Berlin

Sendinaden is a startup whose product is the Pattern Breathe Mask, a 3D printed breathing mask tailored to each face. Their goal is to improve health by filtering the air inhaled and changing the way of breathing, and from this month, they are available on the global market. Serona is a mobile platform that enables accurate and affordable hormone testing through saliva and management of that data. MediKeep is a mobile application for home pharmacy. It has the option to list all medications by scanning barcodes or searching the database by expiration date and remaining quantity, and it also functions as a reminder for taking medications.

Viomedo provides patients suffering from incurable diseases easier access to innovative therapies that are still in the clinical trial phase. This online platform currently contains over two thousand clinical trials that are open to patients in Germany. Vitameter is a small device for measuring vitamin levels in the body so that their levels can be accurately monitored and to see if there is a deficiency or excess of certain vitamins. It works in a similar way to a blood sugar measuring device, and a drop of blood is required for analysis.

These are the five startup teams that went through the Grant4Apps accelerator program of the German pharmaceutical company Bayer last year. It is a mentoring program in which startups dealing with the digitalization of healthcare receive knowledge from Bayer’s and external experts, office space at Bayer’s headquarters in Berlin for one hundred days, and an investment of 50 thousand euros. Since 2015, startup teams from anywhere in the world, including Bayer employees, can apply for the program. Interest in the accelerator has tripled compared to the previous year, with more than 200 applications from 48 countries, mostly from Europe and the USA, and the number of applications from Asia, especially China, has increased. Grant4Apps will continue this year, with the aim of advancing digital innovations in the field of healthcare.

This year, Bayer employees were also encouraged to come forward with their ideas and projects for the accelerator program. Thus, one of the startups that went through Grant4Apps in 2015, Sendinaden Limited, was founded by a Bayer employee in China. Serona (formerly Hack My Hormones) is from the USA, MediKeep from Estonia, Viomedo UG from Germany, and Vitameter from Canada. Last year, for the first time, two startups used Bayer’s laboratories in Berlin as they needed additional capacity to test their ideas and concepts in reality. Bayer HealthCare CoLaborator provides young life science companies access to Bayer’s expertise and global research network, as well as laboratory and office infrastructure in Berlin and San Francisco. Bayer HealthCare managers were involved in evaluating applications, and the criteria were the maturity of the company, existing products and prototypes, team quality, and how well it fits into Bayer’s area of interest.

The Grants4App accelerator is part of Bayer HealthCare’s open innovation initiative aimed at creating an environment that fosters digital innovations in the healthcare sphere. For a corporation like Bayer, exposure to a completely different culture that prevails in startup companies is also important. – We can learn a lot from startups. For example, they are not afraid of failure because they learn from it, constantly experiment, and start something new. This cultural exchange is very important to us. They, in turn, get to know different business models, strategies, and marketing through us because they often have good solutions but do not know how to bring them to market – said Johannes Schubmehl, CIO of Bayer HealthCare, adding that they have no interest in acquiring any of these companies and that their goal is mutual collaboration and learning.