Award winners at Fit 4 Start Awards, Nexus 2025;
Credit: Steven Miller, Chronicle.lu
On Tuesday 17 June 2025, as part of the Luxembourg’s Nexus technology symposium, startup acceleration programme Fit4Start held an award presentation for its enrolees.
The event, hosted by Co-Founder and Vice President of Workshop4Me, Atreyam (Leo) Sharma, began with a roundtable panel discussion involving CEO of Salonkee, Tom Michels, Founder and CEO at Äerd Lab, Angelika Bocian-Jaworska, and Director at Stellar, Simeone La Torre.
When asked about how Salonkee progressed from a startup operation to having 250 employees, Tom Michels said: “It is amazing to see the evolution.” He added: “I think it is really about early on getting this product market fit right ... we just kept expanding and refining our output to markets and then we knew, okay, we are ready to scale and move faster.”
Angelika Bocian-Jaworska was asked about the challenges she faced in establishing a startup in Luxembourg and the assistance she received from Fit 4 Start. She remarked: “I think the main challenge was to create a strategy for the company and also to develop the company during the programme … so I think that was the main challenge, to structure it in a way that is starting from two people, you have to kind of scale your operations and your team.” She added: “I think the coaches helped me a lot, because as a startup, we are sometimes blocked to sell our products. In our mind, they are not perfect. So, they helped me to actually sell as much as possible, to find as many clients as possible. It gave me a lot of self-confidence in my startup and my products.”
Simeone La Torre was asked what separated the startups who fail and those who succeed. He answered: “The ones that make it are the startups that come into the programme with an open mindset. They come into the programme with the idea of being open and ready to challenge what is their core inner idea when they start.”
CEO and Founder at Nuwacom, Christophe Folshette, then gave a speech where he recalled his journey as an entrepreneur, providing details on the challenges raising funding, the different psychologies involved in trying to sell to markets in different countries and what he would have changed earlier in the process knowing what he knows now.
He said: “[When] we go to Germany they think we are German but we are not German. We go to France they think we are French but we are not French. We go to Italy and we had Italian speakers back here in Luxembourg and it worked just so well … we are a Luxembourg-based company, which is such a huge benefit … within Europe.” He added: “Then we went to the UK and they knew we were not British. That was really a problem at that time and that is something we had to figure out how to solve that.”
Atreyam Sharma then hosted the award ceremony for this year’s Fit 4 Start graduates. The awards were divided into three categories: Digital; Health; and Space.
In the category of “Digital”, the winners were:
⁃ Algora (financial-market intelligence);
⁃ Datasecure Anti-Ransomware by Cortex Security (cybersecurity);
⁃ Elora Call (AI for businesses);
⁃ Essembl (AI for fashion);
⁃ Kyomei (AI for psychotherapists);
⁃ Letztrail (networking for outdoor activities);
⁃ Partao (marketplace for industrial equipment);
⁃ Social Cooling (plug-and-play air conditioners).
In the category of “Health”, the winners were:
⁃ Glacies Biome (Skincare and microbiome analysis);
⁃ Global Particle Therapy (affordable cancer therapy);
⁃ Helical (AI-based drug development);
⁃ Trialcraft (AI-based medical writing tool);
⁃ Zenzen (personalised assistance for pregnant women with diabetes).
In the category of “Space”, the winners were:
⁃ Aeon (real-time positioning technology);
⁃ Exobiosphere (space-based platform for accelerated drug discovery).
