ViennaUP, the start-up festival in Austria, is a city-wide festival celebrating all things entrepreneurship and innovation in the heart of Europe that took place 3-9 June 2024. The festival is a unique, interconnected experience for startups, investors, tech enthusiasts, creatives and visionaries.
Through collaboration with the University of Vienna, Brunel entrepreneurs Christopher D’Souza and Sean Hayes had the opportunity to attend the festival as well as pitch their business ideas at the Joint Forces pitch competition in an all-expense-paid trip.
Christopher D’Souza, Biosciences (PhD) student is the founder of ProPrep. ProPrep is a Protein Preparation System. His business idea centres developing protein production technology, to reduce costs and increase productivity for scientists like himself, who produce proteins for medicines such as vaccines. Ultimately, this is to accelerate the research and development of protein-based therapeutics.
Sean Hayes, recent Psychology (MSc) graduate is the founder of More Connection Co., a company pioneering new ways to improve the quality of online interactions by helping people feel more connected on video calls. Their first product the MoreConnectCam, is an eye contact webcam allowing users to simultaneously look at who they are talking to on the screen in front of them, while also looking into the lens of the camera. A duo More Connection Cam setup empowers users to make "video call eye contact" with each other, described to feel similar to eye contact in a "face-to-face environment."
After pitching their business ideas at the Joint Forces competition, a university-led initiative with the aim to build an entrepreneurial community across universities - Christopher D’Souza was crowned the winner, winning a website for his company, made from scratch by one of the competition sponsors.