The Arqus European University Alliance, of which UMinho is a member, is promoting the fifth edition of the Arqus International Innovators Awards initiative, which aims to identify and promote start-up and university-based companies with a view to internationalisation. The previous edition was won by our spin-off Karion Therapeutics.
In 2024 there are six competing projects from Arqus’ partner academies (Granada, Graz, Leipzig, Minho, Padua and Wroclaw). The competition is online and open to the whole community, with voting taking place until 18 November. The most voted/winning project was announced on 19 November at ‘Leipzig Founders’ Night’ in Germany.
UMinho’s representative in this edition is the spin-off OmniumAI, which uses artificial intelligence to support the development of healthier and tastier food products. It was born in 2021 at the Centre for Biological Engineering / School of Engineering at UMinho, by Óscar Dias, Miguel Rocha, Marta Sampaio, João Correia, Diogo Macedo and Ricardo Pereira, a young and enthusiastic team with experience in artificial intelligence and data science applied to different branches of biotechnology.
The project recently won the InvestMatch innovation awards promoted by TecMinho and the School of Engineering, as part of EEUM’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agenda, as well as the StartUp Braga Acceleration Programme and Techstars Startup Week Guimarães innovation awards, with the support of Portugal Ventures. OmniumAI’s goal is to help biotech companies take advantage of their data to make better decisions. For example, with machine learning and deep learning techniques to streamline workflows and solve bioinformatics and cheminformatics problems in omics or biochemical data, such as the identification and registration of genes or in structural analyses.
Learn more about OmniumAI’s CibusAI project here.