On 22 October, at the Auditorium Montale of the Teatro Carlo Felice, twenty startups each had six minutes to present themselves to a jury. It was the first time that the Startup World Cup, the international competition created by the American fund Pegasus Tech Ventures, had come to Genoa: the leg was organised by the Fondazione Genova Startup with CyberTribu, and the afternoon was opened by Bill Reichert, general partner of the fund.
The winner was Corticale, represented on stage by co-founder and CTO Fabio Boi. Second place went to Unconventional Minds, with Paolo Guria; third to Ars Bionica, with Michele Canepa.
First place earned a ticket to the semi-finals in San Francisco. On 4 November, at the Hilton Union Square, Boi presented the company on the day reserved for the winners of regional legs from around the world, and Corticale was one of five Italian companies in the competition. It did not make the ten startups that competed on 6 November for the Grand Finale and $1 million in investment. However, it was selected among the 84 invited to a separate pitch session in front of venture capital funds: for a company at its stage, it is an opportunity to speak directly with investors.
What Corticale does
Corticale designs and manufactures high-density neural interfaces, that is, sensors that record the electrical activity of neurons, and the platforms to acquire and analyse those signals. These are the tools on which brain-computer interfaces are built, the technologies that connect the nervous system to external devices, in the laboratory and in the clinic.
Its main device is called SiNAPS. It is a sensor as thin as a hair, with around a thousand measurement points, which is implanted in the cerebral cortex and reads signals directly from neurons. The electrodes are active: unlike passive electrodes, they do not require a connection between each measurement point and the external electronics. From the outset, the company has declared only one use, a therapeutic one, for diseases of the nervous system and for controlling prostheses and exoskeletons.
The company was founded in 2021 from IIT’s Microtechnology for Neuroelectronics group, led by Luca Berdondini, and started operating with €2 million in private funding from Giuseppe Santella, who joined as co-founder and Chairman. The work behind it goes back further: almost twenty years of research at the Institute, as Boi recalled in an interview with Radio Babboleo. On the same occasion, he explained that Corticale is moving from the laboratory to use on its first patients.
Research that becomes business, on the hill too
On Erzelli Hill, the Italian Institute of Technology has its Center for Human Technologies, where work focuses on technologies for health, rehabilitation and interaction between people and machines. In June 2023, also at Erzelli, IIT presented H4E, the incubator for innovative Ligurian startups created by Invitalia with the support of Filse and the Liguria Region. From the laboratory to business: on the hill, Generative Bionics, the IIT spin-off that builds humanoid robots, has already taken this path.
