Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Hunter,
I came across a recent public signal — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Hunter Bown is the kind of builder venture funds rarely find on warm-intro dealflow. A music educator by training — University of North Texas (BMus, 2015) and Southern Methodist University (MMus, 2019) — he is currently a law student at SMU's Dedman School of Law. None of his formal credentials suggest a top-of-trending coding-agent author, and that disconnect is the most interesting thing about him.
In January 2026 Bown shipped DeepSeek-TUI, a terminal-native coding agent for the open DeepSeek-V4 model written in Rust. By early May 2026 the project hit #1 on GitHub Trending and ~21.7K stars (1.7K forks), getting written up by Cybernews and 36kr. The framing — "Claude Code, but free, open-source, and any model you want" — landed at the perfect moment: Anthropic and Cursor have trained a generation of developers to expect a coding agent in their terminal, and DeepSeek-V4 finally gives indie users a frontier-quality model they can self-host. Bown filled the gap with one repo.
What separates him from a one-hit-trend author is the rest of his pinned work. `aleph` (199 stars) is an MCP server that turns an agent into an RLM — load context, iterate with search/code/think tools, converge. `Hegelion` (155 stars) is a dialectical reasoning architecture for LLMs (Thesis → Antithesis → Synthesis). `Wizards-of-the-Ghosts` (81 stars) is a Hermes-agent skill pack built from fantasy-spell taxonomies. Three different conceptual angles on agent design, not three forks of the same idea. The
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Luca,
I came across a recent Show HN post — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Luca Rossi is a Rome-based engineering writer-turned-builder running Refactoring (refactoring.fm) — a paid newsletter on shipping faster, scaling teams, and engineering management — from a one-person operation. Public reporting puts Refactoring at roughly $300K ARR, fully bootstrapped, with no VC raised. He's been publishing weekly for ~4 years; the audience is mid-to-senior engineers, and the readership skews international.
What's interesting now: he's started shipping software himself. Tolaria — a macOS-native Markdown knowledge-base under his GitHub handle (lucaronin) — broke 300 points on Show HN this April, with comments calling out the polish of the offline-first, file-system-first model (no backend, no SaaS). The product reads as a personal scratch he wrote himself rather than a venture pitch — he's been openly skeptical of cloud-only knowledge tools in his newsletter for months.
Why he's worth a scout call: Italian, ships, has paid-audience leverage that most "first-time founders" don't (~30K newsletter subs as a built-in distribution channel for any future tool), and he's at the early-experiment phase rather than a committed venture. Tolaria looks like a hobby that could become a company if pushed; he hasn't taken outside money and his public framing is "I just want to build things." That's the exact pre-commitment moment Ideation was designed for. Risk: he is doing well bootstrapped — so the conversation needs to be about "what would you do with €300K and a year o
Subject: Quick question — EWOR Ideation
Hi Markus,
I came across your work via a recent public signal. I scout independently for EWOR — a small European pre-seed program with an Ideation track for technical builders who haven't committed to a specific company yet.
If exploring a venture is on your radar at all, would you be open to a 15-min call this or next week? Happy to share more about EWOR if useful, no pressure.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Markus Loeffler is a Frankfurt-based interactive-lighting maker who has spent two decades at the intersection of light, color and code, and is finally turning that craft into a productized portfolio under the Wavelights brand. His CV reads more like a Hollywood post-production credit list than a startup pitch — color science work in film post, a stint in the SONOLUCA interactive video-installation collective (1999-2004), then years of hardware tinkering on the side — which is exactly what makes him interesting now. He is one of those rare hardware founders whose first business does not look like a venture-backed company but instead like the moment a craftsman with a real domain edge decides to ship at scale.
The current product is LumiBand Gen3, a wireless DMX512-over-WiFi LED festival wristband built on nRF52832 with BLE pairing and a live iOS app on the App Store. He has shipped a first production batch of 20 units, runs Etsy and Tindie storefronts, and just opened a Kickstarter for the next batch. The companion app on the App Store under his name is a strong signal — most hardware hobbyists never bridge the firmware/app gap. He has shipped both. Around LumiBand he has a multi-product portfolio (Blinkie, GlowPop, Lumicense), which means LumiBand is not a one-shot — it is one node in a coherent product line for the live-event/installation market.
Why he is worth a scout call right now: he ranks Tier A on three independent signal categories (Hackaday project page, public sh
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Rémy,
I came across a recent public signal — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Rémy Tribhout is the rare deep-tech founder whose origin story is *literally* a Disney film. He saw "Big Hero 6" (2015) as a student at INSA Toulouse, decided that the microrobots in the movie should exist, and started a research project — Decabot — that won the 2015 Alten challenge that same year. He then spent four years at Thales SIX GTS as an expat systems engineer, designing and deploying line 2 of the Panama metro, and three more as a research engineer at the FEMTO-ST Institute. He completed a Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at HEC Paris on the side. In 2022 he founded Phigi to commercialize what he calls "phigital material" — 4mm solar-powered beads that self-assemble into shields, solar sails, antennas, in-space servicing structures.
The Phigi differentiator is Tribhout himself. Building self-assembling microrobotics for space is a 20-year R&D bet that most VCs avoid; doing it as a sole-founder bootstrapped operation with a 4-person team out of Numerica in Montbéliard is unusual to the point of contrarian. He holds a Guinness World Record for the largest autonomous light-block structure — a non-trivial credential that confirms his system actually self-assembles in the physical world. His public materials are remarkably free of hype-language; the Journal du Palais profile (in French) reads as journalistic respect for an engineer who has been quietly executing for ten years.
Funding is appropriately small for the stage: two small regional French innovat
Subject: Quick question — EWOR Ideation
Hi Vejas,
I came across your work via a recent public signal. I scout independently for EWOR — a small European pre-seed program with an Ideation track for technical builders who haven't committed to a specific company yet.
If exploring a venture is on your radar at all, would you be open to a 15-min call this or next week? Happy to share more about EWOR if useful, no pressure.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Vejas S. is a young Luxembourg-based hardware maker with a multi-product portfolio that already cleared an Open Source Hardware Association certification — a credential most hobbyists never bother with and which signals a level of operational maturity that does not match the rest of his public footprint. He is the only OSHWA-certified maker in Luxembourg as of April 2026 (LU000002), and the fact that the certification number is LU000002 rather than LU000001 is itself a tell about how small the maker scene is there. Everything points to an early-career builder who is over-indexing on doing the things right.
The certified product is Kaze, an ESP32-C6 environmental sensor based on the BME280, full MIT-licensed stack with reproducible BOM and firmware. Around it, he is shipping two more projects in parallel: VejasAuth (an RP2350-based hardware passkey/FIDO2 security device) and Twin (a Home Assistant macropad). Three different hardware categories — environmental sensing, hardware security, home automation — each with shipping firmware, each well-documented. That breadth at his apparent career stage is unusual. Most makers double down on a single domain; cross-domain builders this early tend to either burn out or end up running interesting hardware companies.
Signal quality is high across three independent channels (OSHWA registry, GitHub `las-vejas`, personal site `vejas.zip`). No funding history exists. The personal site is polished, which together with the certification sugge
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Daniel,
I came across your work via a recent public signal. I scout independently for EWOR (European pre-seed program). Depending on where you are in your journey — exploring vs already building — they have two different tracks that might fit.
Would a 15-min call this or next week make sense?
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Daniel Ansorregui (GitHub `DarkZeros`) is a Spanish firmware engineer who shipped one of the more technically remarkable open-hardware projects of May 2026: LightInk, an ESP32-based solar-powered e-ink smartwatch with a claimed 9-10 month battery life. The headline feature is the battery; the actual achievement is the rewritten SPI driver running inside the ESP32 wake stub in RTC memory, hitting sub-millisecond display refresh from deep sleep. That is the kind of low-level constraint engineering you cannot get from "vibe-coded" firmware — it requires understanding the ESP32 wake-stub instruction limits, the e-ink driver waveforms, and how to talk to a display before the RTOS has booted. The community noticed: Hackaday wrote it up May 5 2026, then CNX Software, then Hackster.
The repository (DarkZeros/LightInk) is at ~379 stars with 24 followers on Ansorregui's account — a starkly asymmetric ratio that tells you most of the audience came in via the press write-up, not from a pre-existing personal brand. He is, in other words, a deeply technical builder with effectively no online persona to speak of. There is no LinkedIn, no Twitter/X, no startup, no Crunchbase entry. The hardware is open-licensed and there is no commercial entity in sight.
Why he is worth a scout call now: the wake-stub SPI implementation is a load-bearing piece of engineering that nobody else in the consumer-e-ink-watch space has done. It is the kind of technical moat that protects a hardware company from b
Subject: Quick question — EWOR Ideation
Hi Jordi,
I came across your work via your GitHub project (jgauchia/IceNav-v3 — ESP32-S3 handheld GPS, offline OpenStreetMap rendering, mul). I scout independently for EWOR — a small European pre-seed program with an Ideation track for technical builders who haven't committed to a specific company yet.
If exploring a venture is on your radar at all, would you be open to a 15-min call this or next week? Happy to share more about EWOR if useful, no pressure.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Jordi Gauchía is a Catalan firmware engineer in Terrassa who has spent over ten years iterating on IceNav — a handheld ESP32-based GPS unit that renders OpenStreetMap tiles fully offline. The current version (IceNav-v3) was rewritten from scratch about a year ago on ESP32-S3 with LVGL UI, multi-GNSS reception, route recording, and a pseudo-3D nav mode in development. Hackster ran a feature on him in 2025, which is the kind of secondary write-up that usually only follows a single milestone — in his case, the rewrite. The codebase is GPL-3 on GitHub (jgauchia/IceNav-v3) with active issue triage, and the project is also catalogued on Hackaday.io (project 197411).
The interesting profile pattern is duration. Most maker GPS projects are weekend experiments that die when the maker realizes you have to deal with OSM tile serving, GNSS antenna placement and battery management at the same time. Gauchía has been doing exactly this since the mid-2010s and has shipped through three major architectural shifts. That kind of continuity in a single hobby project is rare and predictive — it is a builder who genuinely cares about the problem space.
The product itself sits in a category that has real commercial gravity. Garmin's handheld GPS line (eTrex, GPSMAP) is a multi-hundred-million-dollar business that has not seen a credible open-source competitor in a decade. The maker community has wanted an open-hardware Garmin alternative for years; nobody has shipped one that is actually usable i
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Forrest,
I came across your GitHub project (andrej-karpathy-skills repo, 78.2k stars (April 2026)) — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Forrest Chang is the GitHub author behind andrej-karpathy-skills — a curated repository of Claude/agent "skill" definitions modeled on Karpathy's released style — currently sitting at ~78k stars (as of mid-April 2026). He runs the repo solo. Followers: ~2,800 on GitHub. His bio reads "Building @multica-ai", which means he is contributing to the multica.ai open-source agent platform (founded by dengkui yang, public-facing self-hosted agent project, launched April 12 2026).
Why this matters: Karpathy-style skills/CLAUDE.md ecosystems are the fastest-growing developer category of Q1–Q2 2026 — the meta-tooling layer above coding agents. The repo is becoming the de-facto canonical reference point. Repos this big in this niche are usually where the people who go on to found the next layer of agent infra come from. Chang's repo also has a maintenance pattern (issues triaged within hours, contributor PRs reviewed daily) that reads like a future founder doing range-finding rather than a hobbyist.
Open question: he's currently affiliated with multica-ai, so he may already be committed there. The scout value is twofold — (1) confirm whether he's an employee or just a contributor, and if it's the latter, the Ideation conversation is on the table; (2) even if not, he is a node in a network of people building exactly what EWOR wants — the Karpathy-skills repo's contributor list is itself a Tier A lead pool.
Conversation hooks: the design choices in andrej-karpathy-skills (why these prim
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Tiziano,
I came across a recent grant award — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Tiziano Caldara is a Lausanne-based chemist who took a counter-intuitive route into entrepreneurship: instead of starting with a biologics moon-shot, he picked the most boring possible first product — an endurance-athlete energy gel — to fund a hydrogel platform whose actual destination is oral delivery of GLP-1, insulin and peptides. The technical insight, HyCORE, is patent-pending and was built under the scientific advisorship of Professor Francesco Stellacci at EPFL's Institute of Materials, who runs one of the more prolific supramolecular nanomaterials labs in Europe.
The founding pair — Caldara as CEO, Pietro Nasturzio as CTO — is unusual because their backgrounds blanket chemistry, nutrition, materials science, and drug delivery in a single team. Most foodtech founders have one of those four; biologics-delivery founders rarely have any of the first two. TUUS therefore lands in a niche where the team can plausibly ship a $9 sports gel into elite cyclist hands this year and a CDMO-licensable GLP-1 oral delivery platform within five — funded by the gel revenue along the way. This is exactly the kind of "first product is boring but the platform is enormous" structure EWOR's late-stage fellows (Aspect Health, Thaleron) emerged from.
Funding state is clean: CHF 150K from Venture Kick on 27 May 2026, no prior institutional round, no Crunchbase entry. The $1B energy-gel market is the explicit first revenue layer (their own framing on tuusnutrition.ch), with clinical nutrition
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Martin,
I came across a recent grant award — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Martin Stadler is the kind of founder venture capital tends to overpay for two years too late. He is a PhD physicist out of Professor Jonathan Home's Trapped Ion Quantum Information group at ETH Zurich — a lab that has been quietly producing the most reliable trapped-ion control work in Europe for a decade — and his company QENDRA was incorporated as an ETH spin-off in 2024 to ship the classical control systems his lab spent years building for itself because no commercial vendor served the trapped-ion / neutral-atom market.
QENDRA is, in industry terms, the Cerebras of quantum control: not a quantum computer itself, but the indispensable picks-and-shovels layer that every neutral-atom or ion-trap company has to either buy or build. As neutral atoms (PASQAL, QuEra, Atom Computing) take share from superconducting qubits, the addressable market for QENDRA's box widens fast. Stadler co-founded with Ferdinand Felder (COO) and Chidzahi Mabritto (Deputy CTO) — a small but credentialed trio.
The fundraise discipline is striking. ETH Pioneer Fellowship 2024 (CHF 150K to commercialize research); Venture Kick CHF 150K in April 2026, brought in as headline funding. No outside VC. Tech.eu and Startupticker.ch covered the raise; both quote founders saying customer acquisition for 2027 is already underway. The implication: they have customer pipeline before institutional money.
Why this matters for EWOR: Stadler is exactly the "Scientist + Tech Genius" archetype the Ideation rubric lists
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Mathieu,
I came across a recent grant award — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Mathieu Girardin is finishing his PhD in Professor Joerg Huelsken's lab at EPFL, the same group that has produced a steady stream of oncology spinouts. What separates Inkocell Therapeutics from the surrounding noise is the patient-population choice: instead of pitching another solid-tumour CAR-T, Girardin and co-founder Angela Madurga Alonso went after the ~10% of cancer survivors who develop cardiac fibrosis as a long-term consequence of chemotherapy — a population most oncology platforms abandon at remission. Their modality is engineered Natural Killer (NK) cells equipped with a proprietary chimeric antigen receptor designed to attack aberrant cardiomyocytes, with broader downstream potential in autoimmune and fibrotic disease.
The funding picture is small and clean. Crunchbase records $188K total — a single Venture Kick seed in September 2025 (CHF 150K). The April 2025 Venture Kick cohort additionally included Bioscibex and OrthoSens, but Inkocell secured its CHF 150K independently. EPFL spin-off incorporation was scheduled for end of 2025 per the EPFL Tech Transfer announcement. There is no priced seed yet, no institutional VC, no Series A pressure on the cap table.
For an EWOR Ideation Fellowship, this is a textbook fit. Two doctoral candidates from a top-tier EPFL cancer lab, building a CAR-NK platform for an under-served clinical wedge, with a first-in-class differentiation story ("safer, off-the-shelf" NK therapies) supported by the Huelsken group's IP. The technica
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Aaron,
I came across a recent grant award — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Aaron Simone Petruzzella is a sole-founder EPFL biotech archetype: he led the postdoctoral project that produced an antibody-peptide inhibitor conjugate platform (APIC) in Professor Bruno Correia's lab, published the underlying science in Nature Chemical Biology, won an SNF Bridge Proof of Concept fellowship to commercialize it, and spun the company — Biodelphis Therapeutics SA — out of EPFL in January 2026 (four months ago). Faculty co-founders Prof. Correia and Prof. Elisa Oricchio remain advisors.
The APIC concept is technically distinctive enough to merit a brief. Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and bispecifics have dominated oncology pipeline budgets for a decade; Petruzzella's APIC offers a third modality where peptide-based covalent protease inhibitors are delivered via antibody targeting. In the founding paper, he demonstrated inhibitors against cathepsins S, B, K and L delivered via anti-CD22, CD79, HER2 and Siglec15 antibodies — addressing the long-standing toxicity/specificity problem of small-molecule protease drugs. That is the kind of platform a Series A drug discovery partner would write a $10M check against.
Funding is intentionally minimal: CHF 150K Venture Kick + a non-equity manufacturing partnership with HAS Healthcare Advanced Synthesis Group (no cash investment disclosed). The company is sub-$1M and pre-clinical. Petruzzella is the sole listed founder, with the faculty advisors providing scientific gravity rather than equity.
For Luca: this is the hig
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Riccardo,
I came across a recent public signal — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Riccardo Chebac is the founder of the most ambitious deep-tech spin-off the Politecnico di Milano Department of Energy has produced in 2025: GraphiCore, a nuclear-decommissioning robotics and waste-management company co-founded with Fabio Vanoni. Both are Department of Energy research fellows. Chebac took first place at the Italian PhD Nuclear Talent Award 2025 with his thesis on optimising graphite-moderated reactor decommissioning — and has also done a visiting stint at UC Berkeley's SALT research group.
The technical claim is hard to overstate. GraphiCore demonstrated a vacuum end-effector that lifts mullite at 1400°C — published in EPJ N — designed for the irradiated-graphite blocks left over from a generation of European Magnox and AGR reactors that the EU is now legally obligated to decommission over the next 20 years. The startup signed an agreement with Sogin, Italy's national nuclear decommissioning agency. They also placed as a 2025 Hello Tomorrow Emerging Deeptech Pioneers finalist out of 4,600+ startups, and were re-recognised on the Top 100 2026 list.
Funding is, for a heavy-tech nuclear startup, intentionally modest: ~$550K from Tech4Planet (Politecnico Milano), Polihub, Switch 2 Product accelerator, and Novaterra Holding. No institutional VC round yet. PitchBook confirms no Series A.
For Luca: this is the Italian deep-tech lead of the quarter. Politecnico Milano-spinoff, signed customer contract with Italy's nuclear authority, world-quality technical paper,
Subject: Quick question — EWOR Ideation
Hi Nicola,
I came across your work via a recent public signal. I scout independently for EWOR — a small European pre-seed program with an Ideation track for technical builders who haven't committed to a specific company yet.
If exploring a venture is on your radar at all, would you be open to a 15-min call this or next week? Happy to share more about EWOR if useful, no pressure.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Nicola Fabiano is the rarest archetype the EWOR rubric explicitly hunts: a senior lawyer with a public-sector data-protection track record who has already pivoted, on his own time and at his own expense, into building free EU AI Act compliance tooling. The credentials read like a CV designed for the moment: founder and partner of Studio Legale Fabiano (Rome), entitled to represent clients before the Italian High Courts; former President of the San Marino Data Protection Authority; former national expert of San Marino to Convention 108 of the Council of Europe and to the CAHAI (Ad hoc Committee on AI) of the Council of Europe; adjunct professor at the University of Ostrava (Rome) on data protection and health legislation; ForHumanity FH-Certified Auditor on the EU AI Act and on FH-EU-GDPR; and an Europrivacy Academy instructor.
The pivot-into-tooling matters. His Studio Legale already runs a public service at compliance.fabiano.law offering a free AI Act Self-Assessment, an AI Disclosure Generator (built to Italian Law 132/2025), a DPIA Generator and a Cookie Policy Builder. This is the 2018-GDPR-consultant-pivoting-to-AI-Act thesis playing out in front of us: he has the regulatory authority, he is shipping the tooling himself, and he is doing it as a free service to bootstrap a future productized offering.
The question for EWOR is not whether the lawyer is credible — he plainly is — but whether he wants to spin a SaaS company out of the law practice. That is exactly the con
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Marzieh,
I came across a recent grant award — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Marzieh Hashemzadeh is an Iranian-origin postdoctoral researcher at IST Lisbon's CENTEC (Center for Marine Technology and Engineering) who founded Frenesim das Ondas to commercialize her Floating Dual-Chamber Oscillating Water Column (FOWC) — a wave-energy converter she validated at 93% conversion efficiency in regular waves. The Tethys/PNNL validation page lists the company among Lisbon's top renewable-energy operations. She has also previously won Women TechEU under EISMEA — a repeat EU non-dilutive grant winner profile is rare.
Two details elevate her above the typical academic-spinoff founder. First, the FOWC patent is filed and validated — wave energy is a sector littered with under-tested concepts, and an independent PNNL validation is a hard-won credential. Second, the team composition is deliberately diverse across gender, racial, and nationality lines, with the founder citing "diverse teams lead to higher innovative performance" as the founding thesis. CTO Kourosh Rezanejad complements her on the engineering side. The company is parallel-listed as Wave To Energy, a spin-off of PhD researchers focused exclusively on FOWC commercialization.
Funding is genuinely non-dilutive and modest. Women TechEU (€75K) plus EIC Pre-Accelerator (up to €500K) totals ~$625K. No private VC. The EIC Pre-Accelerator cohort of 70 winners is highly selective (Portugal, Estonia, Turkey topped the list); inclusion places Frenesim near the top of European widening-country deep-tech.
For EWO
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Yuliia,
I came across a recent public signal — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Yuliia Habriiel is a Ukrainian-born lawyer-turned-founder who built eyreACT — an EU AI Act compliance automation platform — out of frustration with the gap she watched form in her own field. By training she is a lawyer specializing in IP and regulation; her last full-time role before founding was as a Data Protection Officer in London. The pivot story is concrete: she sat through consultants, law firms and investors all describing the same EU AI Act compliance problem without anyone actually building tooling for it, and decided to leave a London-based career plan to ship the platform herself. The company is registered in Estonia (entity 17416756, Tallinn) and operationally headquartered in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
eyreACT is a "triple-engine" automation product: AI risk assessment, audit-ready documentation generation, and remediation workflow management. The pitch is precisely on-trend for the EU AI Act August 2 2026 enforcement deadline, which has compressed the buying cycle for compliance tooling among mid-market AI builders. Habriiel validated the product at VivaTech Paris 2025 and is now backed by HBM AI partners. Pre-seed funding sits at approximately €500k, raised in 2025 — well under the EWOR $1M cap.
Why this is a strong Traction-stage candidate: the founder background is non-obvious in the right way (lawyer-builder is the rarer subtype, and DPO experience is exactly the customer her product serves), the timing is mechanical (Aug 2 2026 enforcement creates a forced-b
Subject: EWOR — quick intro
Hi Harshal,
I came across a recent grant award — I scout independently for EWOR, a European pre-seed program. Their Traction track works with founders who already have something live and are looking for hands-on support before raising.
If the timing makes sense, would a 15-min call work? Otherwise no pressure — happy to send more info.
https://calendly.com/luca-fusarbassini-sns/15min
Best,
Luca Fusar Bassini
(independent venture scout)
Independent scouting; signals from: EPFL Innogrant, Academic, Company Website.
What makes you excited?
Harshal Sonar is a Scientist-archetype founder from the EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab who has spent a decade building soft wearable interfaces and is now turning that capability into a sports-performance product. He completed his PhD in Robotics, Control & Intelligent Systems at EPFL in 2021 under Prof. Jamie Paik, with prior MS in Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay (control & computing). His doctoral contribution is meaningful, not generic: he prototyped a self-sensing soft pneumatic actuator with soft strain sensors ("SPA-skin") that achieved closed-loop control over haptic feedback on an entirely soft platform — a first in the field, written up by EPFL News and EurekAlert and published in Soft Robotics and Advanced Intelligent Systems.
Between PhD and current company he served as Head of R&D at BEARMIND, an EPFL spin-off in the wearable-neurotech space. So Feedback Intuitive is not his first attempt to commercialize lab IP; it is the second turn of a deliberate cycle of academic depth → industrial R&D → independent founder. He has filed key patents in wearable sensing along the way, which matters because soft-actuator IP is precisely the moat a generalist sports-tech competitor cannot reproduce by buying off-the-shelf NIRS modules.
The product is FI-Tile, a 20-gram wearable that combines near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) with PPG to measure muscle oxygenation (SmO2) plus systemic biomarkers in real time, sized 38×18×10mm. The thesis is sharp: recovery happens in mus