Innovation & Entrepreneurship_100 high-impact cases by Centro de Innovación UC

PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE CHILE

/ 100HIGH-IMPACT

CASES

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/ 100HIGH-IMPACT

CASES

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PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE CHILE

OFFICE OF THE VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH

EDITORIAL BOARD

PEDRO BOUCHON A., UC VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH

MAGDALENA AMENÁBAR F., UC VICE PRESIDENT FOR COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL OUTREACH

RAMÓN MOLINA C., EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE UC INNOVATION CENTER

ALEX PARNAS H., ENTREPRENEURSHIP DIRECTOR OF THE UC INNOVATION CENTER

ÁLVARO OSSA D., UC DIRECTOR OF OFFICE OF TRANSFER AND DEVELOPMENT

MARÍA ELENA BOISIER P., UC DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH

EXECUTIVE BOARD

MARCELA BRIONES E., DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS AND CORPORATE AFFAIRS OF THE UC INNOVATION CENTER

NANCY RAMPAPHORN, UC DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF LIAISON AND MARKETING OF THE OFFICE OF TRANSFER AND DEVELOPMENT

PAMELA SILVA V., PROJECTS AND BRANDING MANAGER OF THE UC INNOVATION CENTER

EDITORIAL PRODUCTION AND COPY EDITING

PABLO MÁRQUEZ F., JOURNALIST AND ACADEMIC OF THE UC FACULTY OF COMMUNICATIONS

DESIGN AND LAYOUT

MARÍA SOLEDAD HOLA J., UC CORPORATE DESIGN DIRECTOR

MARÍA SOLEDAD TIRAPEGUI S., DESIGNER OF THE UC CORPORATE DESIGN DEPARTMENT

MARÍA INÉS VARGAS D., DESIGNER OF THE UC CORPORATE DESIGN DEPARTMENT

PHOTO PRODUCTION

PHOTOADVISOR.CL

UC PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE

SPECIAL THANKS TO THOSE WHO PROVIDED PERSONAL FILE PHOTOS

PRINTING

FYRMA GRÁFICA

FIRST EDITION AUGUST 2023

700 COPIES

ISBN Nº 978-956-14-3151-5

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100 HIGH-IMPACT CASES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the fruitful collaborative work in compiling the 100 cases highlighted in this issue, which was carried out by the different areas of the University that promote innovation and entrepreneurship. For this reason, we would especially like to highlight the support of the deans of the 18 UC faculties, and directors, who diligently recommended members of the UC community trained in their schools.

We would like to give special recognition to the work of Felipe Bahamondes and the Dictuc team, who, in addition to promoting the country’s technological development for almost 80 years, actively participated in the evaluation of the selected cases; and to Alfonso Cruz and the Copec-UC foundation team, who also proposed cases and have been for 21 years a fundamental part of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem of our University.

We thank everyone who generously shared their stories and graphic material. We extend our admiration and sincere congratulations for the work they do in promoting our country’s development.

We are globally facing cross-cutting and complex issues such as climate change, the water crisis, the collapse of urban spaces, challenges in areas of education, food, human and environmental health, and information management, among many others. We will find solutions to such complex problems in interdisciplinary research.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION THE UC HALLMARK

Innovation, entrepreneurship and technology transfer are fundamental pillars for our university. Alongside excellence in training new generations of professionals and the development of world class research, our challenge is to achieve that knowledge in our classrooms and laboratories is connected to the needs of the socio-productive sector, with the purpose of generating solutions based on science that impact the people’s quality of life.

The innovation stories in this book are clear examples of the way in which the Universidad Católica has become a seedbed of initiatives that are creating an important social, economic and environmental impact, not just in Chile, but also globally. The selected cases are evidence of the work that has been developed in the UC for years. We have promoted innovation and entrepreneurship as a hallmark in our student trainings; we create the conditions for our researchers to develop high-impact innovations that can be transferred to society and the market; we aim to foster dialogue with actors of the socio-productive sector for the co-creation of science and technology-based solutions; we promote academic entrepreneurship and the creation of spin-offs, as a vehicle to facilitate the dissemination of research results to society.

The pandemic made evident the leading role that science and technology play in people’s wellbeing. We are globally facing cross-cutting and complex issues such as climate change, the water crisis, the collapse of urban spaces, challenges in areas of education, food, human and environmental health, and information management, among many others. We will find solutions to such complex problems in interdisciplinary research. Hence, the development of innovation and entrepreneurship to meet these challenges is a priority, not only for universities, but also for the State, companies and civil society organizations.

According to data from the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation, Chile has built an ecosystem which has been strengthened over the last few years, with a small but productive and high-impact scientific community. However, the great issue to overcome is the gap existing between researchers and scientists in the productive sector. There is still little collaboration between companies and universities and the R&D expenditure of the private sector is still limited. The good news is that Chile has the best indicators for entrepreneurship in Latin America, and combined with a high scientific capacity, it is feasible to consider promoting entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology as an engine of development for the country.

In the University we will continue on this path, promoting the results’ transfer in our academics, motivating the entrepreneurial spirit and connecting us to society to contribute from our work to the integral development of Chile.

IGNACIO SÁNCHEZ D. President Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

We present this book of 100 cases of innovation and entrepreneurship, whose stories reflect how different members of the UC community solve societal problems in a concrete and effective manner.

MULTIDISCIPLINE FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

The University has made a firm commitment to promote research, creation, innovation and entrepreneurship as core issues of its work. This, in order to increase the impact in society through the transfer of the generated results, thus enriching and amplifying academic and student experience.

To illustrate this imprint, from the Office of the Vice President for Research, with the support of the Office of the Vice President for Communication & Cultural Outreach, we present this book of 100 cases of innovation and entrepreneurship, whose stories reflect how different members of the UC community solve societal problems in a concrete and effective manner.

The support provided by the University is not limited to training and research, but also extends to initiatives such as the ones offered by the UC Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center(with programs such as Jump, BRAIN, Red de Mentores, FabLab and Discovery-A), the Office of Transfer and Development, the academic units, the Copec-UC foundation and Dictuc S.A., among others.

While researching which cases have been exemplary, we discovered important milestones such as the concession of the first patent in the UC, in 1976, with a technology in the energy sector; the birth of the first spin-off in 1993 by Professor Miguel Nussbaum (Solex), the Natural Response foundation, by Professor Ricardo San Martín in 1995, both under the wings of Dictuc S.A.; and the first research result licensed to the company Elemental in 2007 (Modular Prefabricated Construction System) by Professor Alejandro Aravena.

The selected cases have been developed either by UC academics or supported by our programs, or alumni, reflecting our imprint. Given the amount of initiatives, several criteria guided the selection, such as the creation of value and generation of economic, social and environmental impact; to have a business model that is self-sustainable, scalable and replicable in other markets; to have raised public or private investment, or received support from programs promoted by the UC, with emphasis on cases that come from research results that have been transferred or are in an advanced process of transfer to the socio-productive sector.

The University belongs to a broad context in which the linkage with the public sector, companies and civil society organizations play a leading role. Special mention deserves the support of Corfo and ANID,, through programs that provide public financing and that are implemented with the purpose of strengthening institutional capabilities. This, together with the industry’s growing need to diversify its spheres of action and impact, as well as the increase in financing options and venture capital funds, allows to predict better future development, albeit it still is on an initial national level.

We hope that this publication inspires, connects and multiplies the impact of the innovations created by the members of our community, and serves as a model for new generations, helping to increase female leadership and promoting our country’s development.

PEDRO BOUCHON Vice President for Research Pontificia Universidad Católica

de Chile

Universities play a crucial role when it comes to providing the necessary knowledge, capabilities, community and the resources to implement, develop and manage successful enterprises.

REAL WORLD SOLUTIONS

It is an honor to share my thoughts on the importance of universities in the promotion of innovation and entrepreneurship, and celebrate the impact that the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile is having in Chile and in the world. Over the past decade, with the creation of the UC Innovation Center, groups from across the university collaborated to develop and increase important innovations in a wide range of disciplines, such as health, food, energy, transportation and education. These initiatives are collectively creating a more equal, sustainable and prosperous world.

Universities play a crucial role when it comes to providing the necessary knowledge, capabilities, community and the resources to implement, develop and manage successful enterprises. They provide an environment in which students can learn, experiment and innovate together, creating a synergy that is unparalleled in any other environment. Due to the diversity of the student body, universities provide a fertile ground for students from disparate fields to come together to work on interdisciplinary projects that flourish and grow into real-world solutions. These young entrepreneurs create jobs, boost innovation and stimulate economic growth, thus addressing vital social challenges, such as poverty, hunger and environmental sustainability.

Entrepreneurship is a powerful motor of empowerment, especially for those who are underrepresented, including women. Through entrepreneurship, women can break the barriers of gender inequality, achieve financial independence and contribute to the economic growth of society. By creating their own businesses, women can become leaders in their communities, creating jobs and boost economic growth.

TINA SEELIG

Executive Director, Knight-Hennessy Scholars Director Emeritus, Stanford Technology Ventures Program Stanford University

BIOTHERVAX

100 HIGH-IM

BASURAPP

DISPOSITIVOS ANTISÍSMICOS

NUEVAS VARIEDADES DE FRAMBUESAS

MPACT CASES

Food 29

LONG LIFE FOR SALMON. 30

WHAT FLAVOR DO YOU PREFER YOUR PROBIOTIC?. 32

RECOVERING THE BEST PARTS OF THE FRUIT. 33

TASTIER AND HEALTHIER SNACKS. 34

HONEYS FROM CHILE AND FOR THE WORLD. 36

CHANGING THE CHIP MARKET. 38

Social Innovation 19

ELEMENTAL ARCHITECTURE. 20

MORE THAN JUST A “TECHO”. 22

SUPPORTING GOOD PAYERS. 23

INTIMATE STORIES TO TELL THE WORLD. 24

IMPACT FINANCING. 26

HEALTHY HABITS IN THE WORK ENVIRONMENT. 27

RIDING TOWARDS A MORE ACCESIBLE WORLD. 28

A VIRTUAL AGRICULTURAL ADVISOR. 39

THE PLANT-BASED FUTURE. 40

DEVELOPING PERFECT RASPBERRIES. 42

A CRUSADE FOR HEALTHIER FOOD. 44

FOOD AT THE RIGHT TEMPERATURE AND HUMIDITY. 45

Education 47

REVOLUTIONIZE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS. 48

CLOSING THE GAPS IN EDUCATION. 50

ENGINEERING FOR EDUCATIONAL MANAGEMENT. 52

SOCIAL LANGUAGE EDUCATION. 53

EFFECTIVE INNOVATIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL INCLUSION. 54

A GAME TO LEARN HOW TO RESEARCH. 56

TRAINING PRACTICAL SKILLS REMOTELY. 58

SUPPORTING EDUCATION IN VULNERABLE SCHOOLS. 60

Health and Wellbeing 61

VIRUS HUNTERS. 62

THE SPONGE THAT PROMOTES BREAST SELF-EXAMINATION. 64

TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE SPORTS PERFORMANCE. 66

THE BIOMATERIAL OF THE FUTURE FOR BONE GRAFTS. 68

A SIMULATOR THAT TRAINS SKILLS IN THE HEALTH AREA. 70

AN ACCURATE TEST FOR SKIN INFECTIONS. 72

STIMULATING BREATHING IN PREMATURE INFANTS. 74

A QUICK TEST TO DETECT GASTRIC CANCER. 76

AUTONOMY AND SAFETY FOR SENIORS. 78

REMOTE REHABILITATION FOR PARALYSIS. 79

CANCER AND GENETICS: A PREDICTIVE TEST FOR METASTASIS. 80

A DRUG TO FIGHT OBESITY. 82

CREATING SKIN THROUGH PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN HUMANS. 84

INNOVATIVE PENIS IMPLANT. 86

ACCURATE DIAGNOSTICS TO AVOID UNECCESARY SURGERIES. 88

RESPONSIBLE BIOTECHNOLOGY. 90

THE BENEFIT OF EATING HEALTHY. 90

Sustainability 91

SUSTAINABLE CLEANING OF SOLAR PANELS. 92

BACK TO BULK SALES. 94

TEXTILE CIRCULAR ECONOMY. 95

HYDROELECTRICITY PRODUCED IN THE DESERT. 96

GARBAGE TURNED INTO GLASSES. 97

TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS FOR IMPROVED ENERGY MANAGEMENT. 98

GOODBYE TO THE CONCEPT OF “TRASH”. 100

BIO-RINGS TO SAVE THE MARINE FAUNA. 101

THE VALUE OF ADVERTISING WASTE. 102

OPTIMIZING RENEWABLE ENERGIES. 103

WIRELESS SENSORS FOR THE INTERNET OF THINGS. 104

100% DIGITAL INDUSTRIAL WASTE MANAGEMENT. 106

AN APP THAT SEEKS TO HAVE CLEANER CITIES. 107

THE LEADING APPLICATION OF SUSTAINABLE BICYCLES IN THE UK. 108 GREEN PHONES. 109

Biotechnology 111

THE MAGIC OF PRODUCING ANIMAL MEAT WITHOUT KILLING ANIMALS. 112

AN ANSWER TO WATER SHORTAGE. 114

TECHNOLOGY FOR CLEANER MINING. 116

ENZYME REAGENTS FOR DRUG DETECTION. 117

PRECISION BREEDING IN FRUIT TREES. 118

Systems and Technologies 119

THE ROBOTS THAT CONTROLS PRICES AND STOCKS IN SUPERMARKETS. 120

TRANSFORMING SCREENS INTO TOUCH SURFACES . 122

SAFETY IN MOTION: ANTI-SEISMIC SOLUTIONS. 124

SAFE POWER LINES FOR MINING SITES. 126

SIMPLIFYING PERSONAL FINANCES. 127

“CAGE” BUILDERS FOR MAGNETIC RESONANCES. 128

MANAGEMENT FOR THE EFFICIENCY OF PRODUCTION SYSTEMS. 130

EARTHQUAKE-SAFE WINE TANKS. 132

SOFTWARE FOR EFFICIENT LAND MANAGEMENT. 134

CONSTRUCTION SAFETY AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT. 136

SPECIALIST IN IMPROVING BUSINESS MANAGEMENT. 138

VIRTUAL REALITY TO IMPROVE PRODUCTIVE TASKS. 140

BETTER PURCHASES. 141

PREDICTING ERRORS WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. 141

Digital Transformation 143

PIONEERS IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION. 144

THE CHALLENGE OF VALUING FINANCIAL INSTRUMENTS. 146

THE LEGAL PLATFORM FOR GLOBAL COMPANIES. 148

DIGITALIZING FINANCIAL INFORMATION. 149

THE APP THAT CHANGED THE WAY WE SHOP. 150

HEALTHCARE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS. 151

TECHNOLOGY THAT FOSTERS TALENT IN THE WORKFORCE. 152

COMMUNITY SECURITY ON YOUR PHONE. 153

EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT OF COMMUNAL FEES. 154

RESPONSIBLE FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION. 155

LOGISTICS ON THE MOVE. 155

MACHINERY THAT IS ALWAYS AVAILABLE. 156

FLEXIBLE WAREHOUSES. 156

MATCHING DEMAND AND SUPPLY. 157

THE FRIENDLY PHARMACY. 157

TAILOR-MADE CAR INSURANCE. 158

CONCERNED ABOUT GOOD EYESIGHT. 158

WIRELESS TELEVISION. 159

THE PERFECT HOME. 159

AN ONLINE ACCOUNTANT. 160

QUALITY USED CARS. 160

DIGITAL MANAGEMENT OF PEOPLE. 161

SUPPORT FOR HEADQUARTERS. 161

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ELEMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

Through his company, Alejandro Aravena, winner of the 2016 Pritzker Prize, has become a world leader in the design of low-income housing solutions.

ONE KEY QUESTION

A fundamental character in the formation of Elemental was Chilean engineer Andrés Iacobelli – later the first director of UC Public Policy Center and with high positions in the Government-, with whom Aravena met at Harvard University where he taught at the beginning of the 2000s. “If Chilean architecture has so much prestige worldwide, why is social housing so poor?” was the question he asked Aravena and what triggered a deep reflection in him.

ELEMENTAL EN ACTION /

The draft of the Constitution was submitted in 2013.

“We’ve never asked ourselves nor proposed what our mission, vision or look into the future is. Never. We also haven’t thought of a strategy. It has been the other way around, because we get questions that are absolutely beyond us and for which we are not prepared, but we’re interested in”, says Alejandro Aravena.

By far, the most renowned Chilean architect on the whole planet is the executive director of Elemental, the company he founded with Gonzalo Arteaga, Juan Cerda, Víctor Oddó and Diego Torres, with the initial contribution of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the Compañía de Petróleos de Chile, Copec S.A. From there, he has developed public and private projects in different parts of Chile, but also in countries that are far away from ours, such as Switzerland, China, Qatar, Italy and Portugal, in addition to Argentina, Mexico and Brazil.

Aravena emphasizes thatElemental is a do tank, it originated in 2001 in the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University, when he set out to solve the question: “How can we build cheap housing that can grow, that is not overcrowded and that creates a neighborhood?”. In 2003, under the auspices of the Faculty of Architecture of Universidad Católica, this work was professionally developed in Chile.

This was the first architectural initiative to obtain a Fund for the Promotion of Scientific and Technological Development (Fondef)

and it was concretized in Quinta Monroy, in Iquique: 93 homes with a basic bathroom and kitchen, in reinforced concrete blocks, initial construction of 36 m2 and a projection of 70m2; and apartments with an initial construction of 25 m2 and projection of 72 m2, on a 5,025 m2 lot located in the center of the city.

This innovation, known as “incremental housing”, stems from research results protected by a patent and licensed to the spin-off company created by Aravena, together with other architects of Universidad Católica.

“The name Elemental stems from the need to change the negative label to social housing.

THE EARTHQUAKE

Elemental was devoted to different projects that today are found all over Chile, until the 2010 earthquake gave them the challenge of developing the Sustainable Reconstruction Plan for the municipality of Constitución, in the Maule Region. By that point, they had already worked on the answer to other questions that were fundamental to finding the solution. “Questions arose not only about housing but also about public space. So, we were more prepared when the earthquake happened, to cover more areas where we could link the University’s knowledge with reality,” he says.

All of this work brought Aravena and his team worldwide recognition. In 2016, was crowned by the Pritzker Architecture Prize: “Alejandro Aravena personifies the rebirth of an architect committed to society. (…) The role of the architect is being challenged to serve mostly social and humanitarian needs, and he has responded to this challenge in a clear, full and generous way,” said the jury’s minutes.

“Architecture is an art, where the role of intuition is fundamental. Our way of getting into

“We are enthusiastic about projects that have led us to do things we never imagined we could develop. And once it happens, we try to live up to it,” says architect Alejandro Aravena.

Our idea was to get to the irreducible nucleus of a specific problem, something that is desired in any context, but is obligatory in social housing and raises that difficult question that requires professional quality, not professional charity”, says the architect.

In 2006, Elemental became a small company, which today has 15 professionals. “And it’s going to continue being this way, because it gives us the freedom that we like”, clarifies the winner of the 2016 Pritzker Prize.

areas that are new to us probably balances their rational of scientific dimension with the intuitive dimension of art,” he explains. “The only condition we ask to work is professional autonomy and intellectual independence. If this is not met, we withdraw. We are enthusiastic about projects where we believe there is a meaningful question, which, in practice, has led us to do many things we would never have imagined we would want to develop. Once that happens, we try to live up to it,” he concludes.

THE PARTNERS OF ELEMENTAL / Víctor Oddó, Juan Ignacio Cerda, Diego Torres, Alejandro Aravena and Gonzalo Arteaga.

MORE THAN JUST A “TECHO”1

The dream of a group of young UC students, in 1997, is a global organization that tackles precarious housing today.

GETTING DOWN TO WORK / TECHO volunteers working on the construction of a house.

TECHO-Chile is a non-profit organization dedicated to families in precarious housing conditions that works in 11 regions in our country with the purpose of building fair, humane and inclusive cities, where everyone can access a decent place to live.

It was born in 1997, when Francisco Irrarázaval led a group of students of Universidad Católica, to build emergency housing in Curanilahue and Lebu, in the Biobío region, giving birth to the Fundación Un Techo para Chile.

Today it is named TECHO and it has grown to such an extent that it has become a non-profit organization present in 18 Latin American countries, as well as in the United States and Europe. Since 2006, in Chile, it has been a Social Real Estate Management Entity (EGIS) of the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism.

In its more than 25 years of history, it has undergone a series of changes, but the necessities of the territory are still the same and for every solved case , several others appear.

“We have been expanding in line with the needs of the families and communities, and two years ago we strengthened our work in housing further,” explains Patricio Neira, CEO (Chief Executive Officer).

Today, TECHO has expanded globally and is focused on the housing problem and its consequences, focusing its efforts on the dignified transition of families living in emergency situations towards a formal or definitive solution.

(1) “Roof” in English. For the purposes of this document the word “TECHO” will be used hereinafter without translation.

UNSTOPPABLE FORCE

In Chile, TECHO has mobilized more than 60,000 volunteers across the country, providing more than 50,000 emergency housing units, it has developed 99 projects of definitive housing, benefitting more than 8,200 families and it has generated evidence and applied research on problems related to the housing system and its structural causes (eleven national registries of camps, research documents, among others).

DESTÁCAME

SUPPORTING GOOD PAYERS

Many people are unable to access credit because they do not meet the requirements. Destácame solves this problem.

Destácame is a platform that began seeking to reward good payers, which is reflected in their good behavior and based on their responsible payment of their electricity, water and cell phone bills, among others.

Today, Destácame is an integral solution and has positioned itself as the lead web platform of financial wellbeing that helps people understand in a more personalized manner, how to organize and plan their personal finances and take control of these to live a more peaceful life.

It offers an ecosystem of tools, education and access to real and practical solutions for their own financial context, ranging from

UC CULTURE

“As an UC alumni, we have leveraged both student and alumni networks to add talented individuals to our team, with high professional ethics and social purpose, who have become Destácame’s main ‘asset’ that enabled us to generate a rich, diverse and unique internal culture”, says Augusto Ruiz-Tagle.

paying off a delinquent debt to regaining access to credit. Or ranging from not being able to make ends meet to being able to save money, which is a major breakthrough.

Destácame was born in 2014, after Jorge Camus (UC commercial engineer), Sebastián Ugarte (UC industrial civil engineer) and Augusto Ruiz-Tagle (UC industrial civil engineer) came back from studying an MBA in the

DESTÁCAME CO-FOUNDERS /

Sebastián Ugarte, Jorge Camus and Augusto Ruiz-Tagle at the offices of Destácame in Santiago.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

“Today, we have more than four million users and we operate in Chile and Mexico. Our main pride is to be capable of articulating multiple organizations that collaborate in generating positive impact in personal finances. By connecting traditional financial institutions, fintechs, public and private information managers, every month we help thousands of people to get in order, pay their debts, save and (re)start a path to the financial system,” says Augusto Ruiz-Tagle.

“In the long term, we project Destácame in line with our main objective, which is to help people use their personal data for their own benefit,” concludes Sebastián Ugarte.

STEPS TO SUCCESS

Thanks to the support of Start-up Chile (a project promoted by Corfo), the founders of Destácame started in 2014 to implement the platform and convincing service providers to participate. By the end of that year, they had managed to finance operations for a year. In May of 2015, they launched a Beta version and then presented the official version.

INTIMATE STORIES TO TELL THE WORLD

The mission of this audiovisual company is to continue to understand the world through the production of auteur documentaries in any of its formats: film, television and online platforms.

Micromundo is more than an audiovisual production company, it is defined as a space created to make documentary films that allow us to explore in depth different realities and to learn about stories that we could not access without the excuse of a camera.

Founded in 2011 by the director Maite Alberdi, her most known accomplishment to date is the success and acknowledgement of the

movie “El Agente Topo”, which led its team to become the first female-led group and the first Chilean documentary to be nominated for an Oscar Award©. “The world is filled with great stories, the challenge is to find them and knowing how to tell them,” says the alumni and professor of the Audiovisual Direction degree at our university. Meanwhile, the production of the film was carried out by Marcela Santibáñez, also alumni and professor of UC Faculty of Communication.

“After the Oscar nomination has changed my life as a filmmaker, mainly in the way of thinking about projects. There are no longer any territorial limits, there are more financing facilities available. The Oscar gives you the possibility to keep on filming, that nomination always means that you will be asked for the next project, it will be a little easier to film than the last time. And, at the same time, it’s more difficult because you have a pressure, a burden and an expectation to fulfill,” confessed the director at the last 2022 version of Un État du Monde Festival, organized by the Forum des Images in Paris.

In addition to “El Agente Topo”, other works such as “El Salvavidas”, “La Once” and “Los Niños” have had a worldwide impact and have been financed by important national and international funds. To date, Micromundo has participated in 140 festivals and received 44 awards, and their plans are to keep on developing and producing documentary feature films that generate an impact in society, not just in Chile but in other territories.

Since 2022, Micromundo Producciones has added branded content to its consulting services and theoretical texts, i.e., the generation of documentary content for different brands. “Our achievements have been made possible thanks to the team’s talent and we are happy to collaborate with them in each new challenge that lies ahead”, highlights Maite Alberdi. “It is exciting for us to find a way to narrate each observed universe in aesthetic terms, in order to communicate our point of view of reality”.

Complementary to her great academic training, she recognizes UC as the institution that provided her with a contact network that forged the possibility of starting Micromundo Producciones’ first projects and to establish itself in the international documentary film market.

MAITE ALBERDI / The filmmaker is an alumnus and professor at the UC Faculty of Communications.

“The world is full of great stories, the challenge is to find them and know how to tell them,” says documentary filmmaker Maite Alberdi, creator of Micromundo.

OSCAR AWARD NOMINATION / Maite Alberdi, the actor Sergio Chamy, and producer of Micromundo, Marcela Santibáñez

FILMING MEMORY

Her last project is “La Memoria Infinita” and tells the life of the actress Paulina Urrutia and her husband, documentary filmmaker and journalist Augusto Góngora, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2014 and passed away in May of 2023. Defined as “the intimate meditation on love and memory”, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival by the end of January 2023, and won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Documentary category. It then had its international premiere at the Berlinale, and since August 2023 it has been screened in multiple theaters in the United States and Chile .

IMPACT FINANCING

This company has contributed more than 1,600 million dollars to accelerate the growth of Latin American SMEs.

Cumplo was born with a single purpose: to combat inequality in the access to capital, thus contributing to the development of a fairer financial market.

“It originated from the impotence of our founders, of not being able to help their loved ones with the payment of their debts due to abusive interest rates and non-transparent information. As an act of rebellion, we founded the organization in 2011,” explains its founder and CEO Nicolás Shea, UC commercial engineer.

How does he do it? Through technology. Cumplo connects those who need capital with all kinds of investors –individuals, investment funds, institutional investors such as insurance companies and AFPs, etc.–which are interested in getting return on their money.

To do so, they should visit www.cumplo. com, where they will find all the information they need.

Currently considered the largest financing platform for SMEs in Latin America, its objective is to reach one million SMEs in our continent in order to unleash their full growth potential.

With operations in Chile, Peru and Mexico, it exceeded US$50 million financed in March 2022 and it strengthened institutional alliances, all with a team of more than 150 people.

EXPERIENCE TO FOLLOW

“UC played a fundamental role in our development. We have participated in different lectures about the project and have been presented as a success story in the classroom. We want to bring students into the start-up and that they develop new strategies for our company. I have also taught undergraduate and MBA classes and, in addition, several alumni of the University work with us,” tells Nicolás Shea.

#CUMPLERS / Josefa Monge and Nicolás Shea, founders of Cumplo.

HEALTHY HABITS IN THE WORK ENVIRONMENT

Through sheer resilience, this company has shown that an organization guided by a social purpose can also be financially successful.

The company was born in 2018 as an app that transformed the calories spent while doing sports into food donations to fight malnutrition in the world. In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, it changed its name to Betterfly, modifying its model, maintaining the contributions but now as a wellness platform that rewards the adoption of healthy habits, whilst also adding life insurance.

Eduardo della Maggiora, founder and CEO, explains that this is how “we became the first benefits platform to combine welfare, financial protection and social purpose”. This solution is offered to companies so that their employees can access telemedicine, psychology, financial education, fitness and meditation apps, among others, along with providing life insurance whose coverage increases with the adoption of healthy habits.

In addition, as users use the platform, they are able to make donations to different social causes.

Betterfly became the first “social unicorn” in Latin America, after becoming the first B corp certified company in the region, with a valuation of over US$ 1 billion achieved in January 2022.

Today, it is constituted as a Public Benefit Corporation in the United States. Its main objective for 2030 is to protect the lives of 300 million people and it is already present in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Spain and Colombia.

MOTIVATIONS

Betterfly was first born out of its founder’s concern to fight malnutrition, and later with the idea of protecting families. A civil engineer from Universidad Católica, Eduardo della Maggiora states that he was strongly influenced by UC hallmark about contributing and giving back to society, which was transmitted to him in the classrooms . “That has always resonated with me and is something I value, share, and have wanted to put into practice through our project,” he explains.

BETTERFLY ON A SMARTPHONE / View of the Betterfly app on a Smartphone.

RIDING TOWARDS A MORE ACCESSIBLE WORLD

This company has channeled the dream of thousands of people with disabilities that, just like its founders, refuse to think that they cannot access the most beautiful parts of our planet.

In 2016, Álvaro Silberstein and Camilo Navarro accompanied by other friends, managed to tour the Torres del Paine, one of the most beautiful tourist destinations on the planet. The undertaking was not simple, because of an automobile accident; Álvaro is quadriplegic since he was 18 years old.

Thus, they raised funds through crowdfunding and called their exploit Wheel The World, causing such an interest that, in addition to raising the money they needed, gave them the impetus to found a travel tech startup with the same name.

“Our mission is that millions of people with disabilities can travel to thousands of destinations”, Álvaro Silberstein explains, Information Technology engineer trained at Universidad Católica, CEO and co-founder of the company. Wheel The World works by means of a platform where those interested can access book accommodations, tours and activities suitable to their accessibility needs.

To date, despite their difficulties, more than two thousand travelers have had the experience of traveling the world and the feat of Álvaro and his friends has gone viral worldwide. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg even showed the experience through a video at his company’s board of directors, after Wheel The World participated in an acceleration program of that social network.

ONLINE CERTIFICATION SYSTEM

In 2016 Álvaro Silberstein became the first person with a disability to ride the Torres del Paine circuit, which has 71 kilometers of beautiful scenery and also a lot of difficulties. Currently, Wheel The World is resuming its activity after the pandemic “that brought the industry to zero”, says Álvaro.

The next steps? They will develop an online accessibility certification system based on their mapping through the Accessibility Mapping System app, which digitizes data such as door width, bed height, shower type, bathroom dimensions and a long etcetera.

CO-FOUNDERS IN THE FIELD / Álvaro Silberstein and Camilo Navarro en Easter Island.

INNOVATION

PROCESS OF CREATING AND DELIVERING NEW VALUE TO THE MARKET, WITH A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MODEL FOR THOSE WHO PRODUCE IT.

Source: Entry Level program of UC Innovation Center.

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

ANGEL INVESTOR

RIDING TOWARDS A MORE ACCESSIBLE WORLD

ICONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

This company has channeled the dream of thousands of people with disabilities that, just like its founders, refuse to think that they cannot access the most beautiful parts of our planet.

n 2016, Álvaro Silberstein and Camilo Navarro accompanied by other friends, managed to tour the Torres del Paine, one of the most beautiful tourist destinations on the planet. The undertaking was not simple, because of an automobile accident; Álvaro is quadriplegic since he was 18 years old.

A NATURAL PERSON WHO DECIDES TO INVEST IN A PROJECT OR START-UP BUSINESS OF ANOTHER PERSON, USUALLY IN EXCHANGE FOR EQUITY PARTICIPATION. IN ADDITION TO MONETARY RESOURCES, HE/SHE CONTRIBUTES BUSINESS OR PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE STARTUP IN WHICH HE/SHE INVESTS.

Lab

ONLINE CERTIFICATION SYSTEM

COFUNDADORES

TERRENO / Álvaro Silberstein y Camilo Navarro en Isla de Pascua.

Source:

to market program of the UC Office of Transfer and Development and the book Jump Chile of the UC Innovation Center.

food

LONG LIFE FOR SALMON

The current dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Loreto Valenzuela, and her team developed a coating called FishExtend, which extends the shelf life of fresh fish.

SALMON FOR THE WORLD

A study by the international congress Save Food!, done in Germany in 2011, found that 35% of fish and seafood are wasted for several reasons. And of that percentage, only 8% are immediately returned to the sea when the collected species are found to be dead, injured or seriously damaged. All the rest of the world’s fish is losing its shelf life between fishing and final consumption. Hence the importance of FishExtend to avoid food waste.

FROM THE LABORATORY TO THE MARKET / The professor and current dean of UC Engineering leads an interdisciplinary team.

In cities without a coast, such as the capital of Chile, receiving a fresh salmon filet at the table is a real luxury. And not just because of the additional cost of sea products related to long distance transport, but also because of the logistic that has to be implemented in the different stages of commercialization: from the moment they come out of the water, to their way onto the table, every day counts and depletes the shelf life of fish and seafood. But FishExtend has come to solve this problem.

The professor Loreto Valenzuela, before becoming the first female dean of UC Faculty of Engineering in 2022, worked with her team from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Bioprocesses on the development of a product that extends the shelf life of fresh fish. Based on an edible liquid coating made from 100% natural ingredients, they were able to extend the shelf life of fresh salmon by up to 50% when spray-applied on the production line before packaging.

The advantages of this innovation, named FishExtend, are that it also works as a barrier against oxygen, water and microorganisms when packaging the product. And the most important thing is that it preserves the quality, color, taste, texture, scent and the pH of the meat, all very important elements for the diner. Most importantly, this happens in a market that, on average since 2018, exports more than 100,000 tons per year of salmon to the United States, every one of those little details matter.

“The coating manages to inhibit lipid oxidation and slows the growth of microorganisms that decompose meat. It is a spray that is applied to the surface of the food, in a very thin layer that is not noticeable,” explains Dean Valenzuela.

TRANSFORMING THEORY

FishExtend was born as an applied research project funded by the Copec-UC Founda -

FishExtend technology is the result of more than 8 years of applied

FORMATIVE ROLE

“Universidad Católica plays a very important role in the formation of people. And I can proudly say that FishExtend and my laboratory have been a fundamental part of the formation of many young people, very capable women and men, but also with great motivation and hope to contribute to society with their work,” says Loreto Valenzuela.

tion in 2013. Together with her team, Loreto Valenzuela was researching until 2016 how to reach the development “Synergic Composition for Keeping Fish and Seafood”, which was sent for patenting in 2018. Today, a response from this process is awaited in Chile, Canada and Europe. Meanwhile, it was granted in the United States, in September 2022.

“It has been a great satisfaction to transform theoretical ideas into possible solutions for society. In this particular project, we have seen how concepts such as circular economy, healthy and sustainable food, waste reduction, among others, have increased their relevance to food consumers, producers and investors alike”, the researcher explains.

The key milestone in this process was the signing of a co-development and sub-licensing agreement between FishExtend SpA, a UC spin-off company, and Natufeed, a Chilean development dedicated to animal nutrition, health and production. From this alliance, the startup Innovai was born to raise capital and then take charge of production and commercialization.

Thus, during 2022 the first investment was received to develop scaling and national and international certifications, in order to later access foreign investors to internationalize and open up more products. Additionally, FishExtend participates in the Catalysis program of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation, and has received support from Corfo and ANID (Start Up Ciencia)”.

“FishExtend’s plans and ideas for the future are, first, to obtain industrial validation to begin sales. Second, to develop new products for other marine species such as shrimp, tuna and tilapia, and to continue with meat products such as beef, pork and chicken,” says Loreto Valenzuela.

Made with 100% natural ingredients, FishExtend prolongs the shelf life of up to 50% of fresh salmon.

100% ORGANIC EDIBLE FILM /

research.

WHAT FLAVOR DO YOU PREFER YOUR PROBIOTIC?

Some years ago, from Russia and with love, arrived in Chile the first ice cream developed on the basis of a bacterium that strengthens the immune system from early childhood onwards.

Anastasia Gutkevich is a Russian economist that arrived in Santiago in 2016, who was invited by the program Startup Chile to develop Bifidice here, the first delicious and attractive probiotic ice cream, made with 100% natural products, by her family business with 25 years of tradition in Russia.

Its main ingredient is Bifidobacterium which resides in the human intestine, and its use is based on the research of the biophysicist Eugeny Gutkevich, father of the professional.

He discovered that Bifidobacterium produces more enzymes than any other bacteria in the body and, when consumed regularly and in a frozen format through Bifidice ice

cream, it strengthens the immune system from early childhood. This prevents allergies, overweight, chronic diseases and digestive problems, especially in children and pregnant women.

Anastasia found great support in Chile through Corfo and Universidad Católica after winning a project with Dictuc S.A. and being supported by Incuba UC, a program of UC Innovation Center.

Her focus is now on continuing to raise investment, developing her e-commerce model with direct sales and five distributors in Chile.

“We have also started sales in Germany and developed new formats of Bifidice. We have surpassed all of our expectations,” says

Anastasia Gutkevich, who adds that the next target, after Latin America and Europe, is the rest of the world.

A SYMBOL OF QUALITY AND PROFESSIONALISM

“Universidad Católica helped us make a really good transition and validate our best business model. In addition, to us UC is an icon of high quality and professionalism, and we verified this when we presented our product. Currently, we are also working with their Medical Center and the football club on a project to strengthen the immune system of athletes,” explains the founder and CEO of Bifidice.

THE FLAVORS OF BIFIDICE / Ice creams with probiotics and mango, vanilla and cocoa flavors, presented in individual packages.

CO-FOUNDERS OF BIFIDICE / Antje Bracker and Anastasia Gutkevich.

RECOVERING THE BEST PART OF THE FRUIT

How to take advantage of the residues of the agroindustry was the question the founders of this venture asked themselves. They were able to answer this question thanks to the study of the raw material and its valorization.

The purpose of Domingo Chong and Mateo Rubio is to combat waste. How? By taking advantage of the food leftovers for a more sustainable and complete nutrition. But not just of any food. Their aim is on a large scale: they work with the nutritional potential of agro-industrial waste –which represents more than 30% of the food produced- such as pulps, peels, seeds and imperfect fruits. Through dehydration technologies they turn these into highly stable and versatile ingredients with which to make functional foods, supplements and snacks.

Cáscara Foods started with the study on how “food waste” affects the sustainability of the agroindustry. “We realized that a lot of ‘waste’ hid nutrients that are demanded by the consumers and are key to people’s health , such as vitamins, fiber and antioxidants. It was at this moment that we knew that there was a space to innovate. The food industry of the future cannot continue wasting so much and the potential of this waste is enormous,” their founders explain.

If establishing a waste supply and recovery chain is very complex, the study of the nutritional potential of the supplies was even more complex. One of the most important support that they received was the participation in the RocketLab program of UC Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center, which helped them in reformulating several aspects of their business model.

Their first sales were made under the guidance of the program and they still maintain links for eventual collaborations. In addition, they obtained financing from Corfo and the Fundación para la Innovación Agraria (FIA) for the execution of projects and waste recovery in different industries.

Currently, Cáscara Foods’ priority is to scale their operations and to amplify their distribution. Their goal is clear: to be the world’s leading company in transforming food waste into new products. Therefore, the plan is already aimed at consolidating a portfolio that will allow them to expand into Latin America by 2023.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To date, Cáscara Foods has achieved local recognition as one of the leading companies in this new industry, with a presence in retail with the first line of super recycled food products in Chile. In 2019 they won the Avonni National Innovation Prize and, in 2021, were part of the Transforma Alimentos Innovation catalog.

MATEO RUBIO / Co-founder of Cáscara Foods, along with products made from fruit pulps, peels and skins.

TASTIER AND HEALTHIER SNACKS

The technology created by Professor Pedro Bouchon and collaborators, to create tasty foods and of high nutritional quality, has required more than 15 years of research and development to reach the market with scale.

SUPPORT OF RELEVANT ACTORS

In 2014, Pedro Bouchon’s development caught the attention of the executives of Nestlé’s main research center, in Switzerland, which was a great incentive: “The most important food company in the world liked my product and I realized that barriers exist, but you can overcome them”. “Although the alliance did not materialize because it was at a very early stage of development, this approach was fundamental for the work done with Nutrisco, a tremendous national company with a global vision”. The relationship with Nestlé continues to this day, through the research of one of their doctoral students who is developing her thesis with them in India. She hopes to replicate the technology at a national level.

UNIQUE TECHNOLOGY / Flip chips have three times less fat and low salt levels.

“I am convinced that luck exists, but that a state of alert is fundamental so as to be able to react to opportunities that arise,” Professor Pedro Bouchon says, founding partner of Flip.

Flip is the name of his start-up that arises from the name of the technology he developed to produce healthier, nutritious snacks with low oil content and, at the same time, with excellent sensory attributes.

“Flip alludes to the other side of things, something that intrigued me since I was an undergraduate in chemical engineering, when I had a mentorship with Professor José Miguel Aguilera –food engineer and National Science Prize–, who opened me up to this world. In particular, I was concerned with improving people’s health through food, based on engineering”, explains the current UC Vice President for Research.

From then on, he devoted himself to obtaining the answer. He continued searching for an answer in his PhD in Reading University, United Kingdom, where he was able to partner up with the multinational company United Biscuits. His research allowed him to better understand the microstructural scale of food and the way in which this can be controlled through design to obtain a product with certain characteristics.

Pedro Bouchon wanted to create chips or snacks from different raw materials –not just from potatoes but also beets, carrots, etc.–that, along with their nutritional properties, to enhance its sensory appeal. “Because even those who are more aware about the effects of nutrition on their health, are not willing to sacrifice the pleasure of eating”, he says.

THE PATH

To achieve this goal, the researcher was interested in knowing what happened to what he has always called “food building blocks” –macromolecules of lipids, proteins and

carbohydrates, for example– when the raw materials were processed.

Back in Chile and parallel to his academic work, Pedro Bouchon continued working on the development of a unique “made in Chile” technology to achieve his low-fat and low-sodium snacks, very high nutrient retention and minimal waste generation due to the full utilization of the raw material. In fact, while a traditional potato chip has a fat content of approximately 30%, Flip has less than 10%.

His project won the Copec-UC Foundation contest and then obtained Corfo funding for its development. Together with the participation of Dictuc and the support of UC, he finally managed to create a machine and a process, currently protected by trade secret that allows him to do all these things.

Thanks to the joint work with Nutrisco holding, “a fundamental alliance” as Bouchon points out, and the support of Dictuc S.A., Flip reached the market in 2021 as part of a pilot plan, marketing mainly through Pronto Copec and through Nutrisco’s website www.lamesadetodos.cl. After a technical scaling-up process, they formed a company that is taking a great commercial leap in 2023, thanks to a substantial increase in production capacity.

“To me, there is definitely no contraposition between science and transfer. On the contrary, the developments we have worked on in UC, have only been possible because they are backed by a very serious and renowned scientific work”, UC Vice President for Research explains.

POWER TO FLY

“We intend to expand in the national market, but we also have the global market in mind. We have already tested the product through the Global UC program in the U.S. and we also have a great commercial capacity of Empresas Copec abroad,” Bouchon explains. “For me it was very exciting to see my product on a shelf, for sale. It was truly magical, a summary of so much history and effort, which started with a first prototype at a laboratory level, which was scaled up to pilot level and to finally reach industrial scale”.

“I am very grateful to Universidad Católica and all of the institutional bodies that have helped me, not because of the position I find myself in, but rather because of the experience. Especially the Office of Transfer and Development, Dictuc S.A. and Copec-UC Foundation. The support in UC allowed me to fly with my ideas and gave me space to make my way. Truly, it has been very, very important,” Pedro Bouchon confesses.

PEDRO BOUCHON / Academic of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Bioprocesses.

HONEYS FROM CHILE AND FOR THE WORLD

Together with her interdisciplinary team, the outstanding researcher Gloria Montenegro developed the Active Patagonia Factor (APF) seal, which certifies the bactericidal capacities of Chilean honeys. UC innovation, protected by trade secret, was transferred to the company JPM Exportaciones, the largest exporter of honey in Chile.

THE TEACHER WHO LEAVES HER MARK /

The professor has passed on her mark to several generations of undergraduate and graduate students.

RENOWNED SCIENTIST

Gloria Montenegro Rizzardini, winner of the Monseñor Carlos Casanueva UC Award, was the first Latin American to win the L’Oréal UNESCO Prize for Women in Science (1998). She has more than 250 scientific publications, 23 books, 37 patents –applied for and granted– and several worldwide awards.

Professor Gloria Montenegro has been an academic at Universidad Católica for more than 50 years, where she is professor emeritus, and does not foresee giving up research. “I still have a lot to do,” she says. “I want to continue studying native Chilean honeys, such as Quillay, Chañar, and others that are not even known, such as Tiaca honey, Tineo, which are plants from native forest in the south of Chile. Since I am a pioneer in the innovation of scientific and technological research on Chilean honeys, I would like to study them all,” she says. Throughout her academic career, Gloria Montenegro has positioned herself at the university as one of the researchers with the largest number of patents.

Eleven years of research were necessary for the team led by the prominent UC Agronomy academic, to create a honey differentiating factor named, in honor of southern Chile, Active Patagonia Factor, APF, which certifies antibacterial capabilities of native honeys.

It legitimizes the value of this national product, certified according to three quality levels (-100+, 150+ and 200+), providing an instrument that positions this Chilean honey as a natural and functional antibiotic, a growing trend in the global market.

Honeys with the APF seal have as their main attribute the growth inhibition of bacteria that affect people’s wellbeing, such as Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Salmonella enterica. Henceforth, this Chilean honey has become the first alternative certified as antibacterial, having Chile’s geographic identification.

research with several FONDECYT projects,” she explains.

A lot of laboratory and field work, publications in high impact scientific journals, dissemination and teaching work, and national and international awards, have passed since then.

The latest award was the London Honey Awards 2021 in the platinum and bronze categories. “It’s very coveted among honey producers around the world,” says the researcher about the award received for the development of the Terra Andes honey with Active Patagonia Factor (APF).

Moreover, Professor Montenegro emphasizes that the process has made a contribution to national beekeeping by positioning Chilean honey abroad. It has also helped local producers, who were trained by the research group to develop new productive skills in a safe and sustainable way. It is focused on the continuous improvement of honey as a unique product both for its conversion to organic, as well as under the criteria of fair trade.

Her work earned her a request from the FAO –Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It chose Chilean honey to document its experience through a study in order to position Chilean honey in the world and for beekeepers in other countries to also take advantage of this knowledge.

Gloria Montenegro is the daughter of a widow with four daughters, who instilled in them a love for reading from an early age. She added to this interest a great curiosity that always led her along the paths of learning and research.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORLD

The research started out casually, when a beekeeper student of professor Montenegro requested to do his thesis with her on the floral origin of her honeys. It provides the name to each honey, i.e. Ulmo honey, Quillay honey, etc. “That’s how we started, financing

VALUE-ADDING TECHNOLOGY /

It is the first Chilean honey to enter the markets of China, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.

“I’m very curious, I like experimenting and it is not difficult for me to think of new ideas, to create and generate more knowledge,” she confesses. “The most important thing is to transfer it to society.”

In Universidad Católica she has been privileged to witness how research and development has evolved. “UC is in Chile the best university for research in which the problem is in technology transfer. I value very much what it does with us, the scientists, because it accompanies us through its Office of Transfer and Development . Therefore, I fully agree with what Rector Sanchez once said: “The concept of innovation is to dream of a better world, to see how you are going towards benefit, how I imagine that we can have better welfare and contribute to the good living of others’”, she concludes.

BIOPROSPECTING

“My line of research is bioprospecting, the systematic search for natural products with biological activity coming from natural resources or from biodiversity in general. And, well, I also work with native and endemic plants, and with derivatives of endemic or native plants such as honey, which has a botanical origin defined by the bee’s selection of food”.

CHANGING THE CHIP MARKET

Thirteen years ago, Carolina Echenique, a former student of UC Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering, created a pioneering and leading company in natural snacks.

In the midst of a crisis due to the loss of a son, UC agronomist Carolina Echenique had a dream in which colorful chips fell from the sky. This subconscious message transformed her grief into a new gestation period: Tika Foods, a venture that revolutionized the snack market by using only 100% natural ingredients, native tubercles that belong to Chile’s cultural heritage.

That dream came up in 2008 and the following year her first product was launched to the market, working from her garage and with her own capital. From then on, she was conquering consumers and gaining space in the supermarket shelf. “We achieved the unthinkable. We created a new category in which we are pioneers and absolute leaders: Tika veggie chips,” says UC alumna proudly.

In 2010, Carolina received the “Young Entrepreneur” award, granted by the organization Mujeres Empresarias, because she managed to position Tika in more than 90 sales outlets and her company had a turnover of more than 100 million pesos in less than a year after its creation.

Today, Tika Foods is already consolidated and has between 8% and 10% of the market. “We don’t have any debt; we’re a healthy company in which we employ 300 people. In addition, we have a network of suppliers of different sizes: we estimate that currently, around 1,500 people depend on our joint work. It is important to us to always keep it that way and with a social conscience as well,” explains Carolina.

Among the brand’s new projects is to create products that have added value, but do not have a very high cost that must be passed on to the consumer. The goal is to make exquisite gourmet chips more and more widespread.

They are also very excited about the projects of a new challenge: Cooperatika. “We allocate 1% of our sales to this initiative that works with vulnerable communities on sustainability issues. We started in Chiloé, where they are also teaching women to make plant nurseries and native forests, and then donate more than 20,000 of these within two years to reforest the island,” says the businesswoman.

THE HELP OF HER PROFESSORS

Carolina Echenique remembers that when she was in the process of creating Tika Foods, she went to UC to ask for information and talk to professors. She adds: “I wanted to tell them what I was planning and listen to their opinions and advice. That support from the Faculty of Agronomy was very positive. I also highlight what UC gave me in terms of training: it was important in terms of values, in supporting you with guidelines about what to do and what not to do”.

FOUNDER OF TIKA / Carolina Echenique with five varieties of chips.

A VIRTUAL AGRICULTURAL ADVISOR

Thanks to this technology it is possible to monitor all key field parameters in real time and make timely decisions.

The electrical engineer Mario Bustamante created Instacrops in 2015 to generate technology that enabled farmers to make data-driven decisions.

Its beginnings were of specific developments, such as a service to detect pests. And the opportunity arose to think of a solution to predict frost, a major problem in the fields, which opened the doors to this new company.

Supported in 2019 by UC Incuba program of UC Innovation Center, today Instacrops focuses on the development of software that allows a farmer to make timely decisions based on key parameters of climate, soil, irrigation, wells, pests and diseases, all through a powerful platform that delivers processed information in a friendly and intuitive way.

In 2022, they launched the new business model Precision Agriculture as a Service (PAaaS), through which it is possible to acquire Instacrops technology under a low-cost annual subscription, with no contracts of tieins. “Our goal is to democratize technology for the agricultural industry, eliminating the need for high initial investment and implementation costs,” Bustamante explains.

It has been fundamental for Instacrops to work with a team of UC MBA students, a great experience in collaboration and learning. “We have managed to develop market studies, business models and financial evaluations of our new technological developments,” Mario Bustamante says.

A LOOKS TO THE FUTURE

The main purpose of Instacrops is to continue developing technological solutions that radically transform the way in which food is produced. Currently they have 49 professionals and offices in Chile, Colombia and Mexico, with more than 300 clients. They also develop projects in Perú, Argentina, Guatemala, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Instacrops

focuses on the development of software that allows the farmer to make timely decisions on key parameters of climate, soil, irrigation, wells, pests and diseases.

MARIO BUSTAMANTE / Instacrops founder participating in the Climate Innovation Summit, held in Mexico City in 2022.

THE PLANT-BASED FUTURE

NotCo, the Chilean company that innovates in the food industry, has among its founders alumnus and UC academic Karim Pichara. He is in charge of developing artificial intelligence that emulates, with vegetable ingredients, flavors and textures of animal products.

ALLIANCE WITH A MULTINATIONAL COMPANY

In early 2022, NotCo announced the creation of a joint venture with The Kraft Heinz Company. Its goal is to reinvent the world production of food and to move towards a more sustainable future. The alliance operates under the control of the company linked to the billionaire Warren Buffet as “The Kraft Heinz Not Company LLC”. Here, NotCo’s role is to participate with its technology and artificial intelligence solutions, while Kraft Heinz offers its brand portfolio to develop plant-based versions.

The food industry is much more complex than it seems. Just look at the product label, which is not easy for the average consumer to understand. The founders of NotCo –Matías Muchnick, Karim Pichara (UC) and Pablo Zamora– understood this and realized, as they recount, that nothing that you consume is what you believe. There are so many mixtures of ingredients that, in the end “all the products in the supermarket should be Not”.

The concept of Not referred to food was installed by this company to name its products that look like what they are not. For instance, Milk that is not milk because it does not have its main ingredient – cow’s milk – is called NotMilk. There is also NotCheese, NotBurgers, NotIceCream, NotMayo, NotMeatMolida and NotChicken.

The innovative idea was born very close to UC classrooms, thanks to the intervention of the then UC Engineering academic Karim Pichara, an industrial civil engineer, master’s degree and PhD in Computer Science from the same university. He had the challenge to develop Guiseppe, an algorithm that recognizes underlying patterns between the components of food and human perception, i.e., in flavors and textures.

Pichara explains: “Giusseppe is capable of understanding everything about the food we

love to eat and to search for ways to recreate it and replacing all of the ingredients that use animal by-products with ingredients of plant origin”. Today he is responsible for providing the Artificial Intelligence technology that NotCo needs to fulfill its mission. “I have to make sure that in the AI team, we are creative, collaborative and focused on achieving results. I’m in charge of designing the approach and vision of NotCo’s AI, for how we plan Guiseppe and how it should collaborate with our food scientists and engineers to enable its discoveries. I have the joy to work with a group of extremely talented and professional engineers that challenge me every day and make me a better leader,” he says.

Between 2017 and 2020, NotCo tripled in size. Today, its products are already in Argentina, Brazil, United States, Canada and Mexico. Its plant-based milks are even sold in the Amazon-owned Whole Foods chain.

BEHIND NOTCO

This company is not just a good idea. Its foundations lie in issues of global relevance, such as health and climate change. Its founders state that of the ten most common causes of death, seven are related to diet. In addition, the food industry wreaks havoc on the environment: abuse of water and marine resources, deforestation and damage to various animal species.

One of the solutions to these problems is the adoption of a plant-based diet. It has many benefits, but it is difficult to incorporate it in a world where our palates are accustomed to animal protein. That is why Pichara’s invention is key to changing our habits.

“Replicating animal products which we all love to eat but are made of plants, gives us the opportunity to reduce our environmental impact without even realizing it. We’re here to create a different food system, reinventing it without animals and for everyone, everywhere,” reads a description of its website (notco.com).

Recognition for his work has been global. In 2021, Wall Street considered NotCo a unicorn: valued at $1.5 billion, with investors such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), tennis player Roger Federer and Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton. The same year, Fast Company awarded it as the most innovative company in Latin America. And it recently won an Effie Awards Chile for the advertising campaign launching its product NotMeat.

As part of UC Engineering community, Karin recognizes that the University, thanks to its academic excellence, provides its students with tools and gives them a solid education that allows them to successfully face the challenges of the working world.

MORE RESEARCH

NotCo already has a research center in San Francisco, USA, and plans to build one in Chile in a joint project with universities. Among its purposes is to provide growth opportunities for professionals in Latin America. The center specialized in machine learning in San Francisco has an in-depth research area in dairy fermentation, since many of the challenges that the company faces are linked to this product line.

GIUSEPPE / The Artificial Intelligence program was created by engineering professor Karim Pichara.

VARIEDADES DE FRAMBUESAS

DEVELOPING PERFECT RASPBERRIES

With years of experience in plant breeding, Marina Gambardella and her team at Agronomía UC have successfully developed seven new and enhanced kinds of raspberries.

UC SUPPORT

Thanks to the funds she has applied for, including the FIA, ANID’s Fondef and Corfo’s Innova, Marina Gambardella’s project has been able to ensure the continuity of her research. “This has enabled me to work on long-term projects. A plant breeding program doesn’t work if it’s only 3 or 4 years, it needs to be 10 or 12 years,” explains the PhD from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and academic at the Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering. . “I am also grateful for the fact that I have doctorate and master’s degree students, being able to interact with them and discovering and solving the small problems that have come up in the research.”

Professor Mariana Gambardella always remembers one of her school teachers when she has to explain her approach to science. “I was fascinated when she started talking to me about genetics and when I got to know the works of (Gregor) Mendel. That was a determining factor in my career. I was 12 or 13 years old when I decided that my work was going to be plant breeding,” the researcher says.

And while in her childhood imagination she had as projects to make watermelons bigger and juicier apples, what really caught her was the possibility to change the genetics of plants and, finally, the origin of life.

Thus, after studying Agronomy, she continued her postgraduate studies in Europe, specifically in Spain, to specialize in breeding and biotechnology. She came to the study of strawberries, because, as she says, it is a fruit that is useful for farmers to have good profitability. This also applies to the raspberry, the species she finally adopted to do her research.

“The world of the raspberry is the world of small farmers and I wanted to give back to them. Without detracting from big agriculture, it has always been more supported by other institutions. And for small farmers it is fundamental to produce a good variety with more kilos. It allows them to improve their quality of life,” she explains.

After years of research, professor Gambardella succeeded in developing three new varieties of raspberries that are entirely Chilean: Santa Teresa, Santa Clara and Santa Catalina, which were obtained by the Raspberry Genetic Improvement Program (PMG) of the Fruit Technology Consortium of the Chilean Fruit Exporters Association A.G. (ASOEX), together with Universidad Católica and the support of Corfo.

The academic explains that these plants are more productive and, at the same time, provide better economic results. In addition, they are of better quality, much nicer to look at and very tasty to eat.

“Plant breeding is a discipline of Agronomy, like Botany, Genetics, Physiology, Biotechnology, Biochemistry. I have always defined breeding as the backbone of a research program in plants, although it could be in animals as well. The main goal is to generate new and better varieties for farmers. Then, they can have varieties that are better suited to the growing conditions and better yields and returns. Consumers also have advan -

THE SEVEN “SAINTS”

GENETIC IMPROVEMENT /

Professor Mariana Gambardella has dedicated years of research to create better raspberries.

Professor Gambardella has succeeded in developing three new varieties of raspberries that are entirely Chilean.

tages, because the fruits are of better quality, last longer or are richer in antioxidants, among other properties. This is the way in which crops are advancing over time,” says the professor.

After the initial work, Marina Gambardella’s team obtained four new varieties. And in this second stage, she says, they have tried to imprint some aspects of genetic improvement that were not present in the first stage. For example, raspberries should be varieties resistant to high temperatures, drought and biotic stress conditions, which is resistance to pests and diseases.

“The raspberry industry has had a setback in recent years. We used to have 12,000 hectares planted and today we are down to a mere 5,000 hectares. And that is because we have lost competitiveness. If I see a resurgence in raspberry production, I will feel that my contribution to getting our country back to its previous production levels and competitiveness has been made. Because that means many more families will benefit, among other things.

The Santa Teresa, Santa Clara and Santa Catalina raspberry varieties are already being planted by small farmers in various parts of Chile with very good results. It has allowed exporting genetics to international markets. In addition, four more varieties were added in 2023: Santa Guillermina, Santa Eduvina, Santa Rosa and Santa Isabel.

A CRUSADE FOR HEALTHIER FOOD

They started making 300 cereal bars in a kitchen and today they work in Chile and abroad to promote healthy eating.

The Wild Foods is a foodtech startup that wants to democratize healthy eating in Latin America. “We sell products focused on making it easier for people to eat better through higher nutritional content than that offered by the competition, food that tastes very good at a fair price,” explains Felipe Hurtado, Chief product Officer, Co-founder and UC commercial engineer.

The company was founded in 2015 as a result of the concern of a group of professionals alarmed by the obesity rates in South America and particularly Chile. Today, it has a presence in more than 10,000 locations in Chile, Peru and Mexico, and it is very close to opening operations in Colombia and the United States.

The company offers a variety of cereal bars, granolas, protein powders, food supplements, vitamins, cookies, chocolates and coffee, among many others, all with no seals, no added sugar, no coloring or additives, low in sodium and low in cholesterol. “We still have a long way to go to reduce the terrible indicators of overweight, by offering a good range of healthy products, but it is a longterm fight that we are willing to take on,” says Felipe Hurtado.

WINNING TEAM

Two of the founders of The Wild Foods and some of the professionals on its staff studied in UC: “They are a very important part of the achievements we’ve made. In addition, on many occasions the University has opened up doors for us to work with students and to show our case, which is appreciated,” Hurtado comments.

FRUIT CHIPS / Dehydrated fruit flakes with no added sugar, no additives, free of seals. Vegan product.

FOOD AT THE RIGHT TEMPERATURE AND HUMIDITY

UNK is a start-up that monitors the supply chain of the food industry. It was founded in 2017 and its mission is to redefine industry standards with technological solutions that positively impact the environment. It defines itself as a partner specialized in solving problems by temperature and humidity, through a system of IoT sensors (Internet of things) that monitors and predicts the behavior of a number of equipment, without having to set up a large project. It serves catering industries, supermarkets, restaurants, pharmacies and food manufacturers. Its work team is made up of more than fifteen people and serves clients in Chile, Mexico, Peru, and soon in Spain and the United States.

“UC Innovation Center opened up a network of contacts and mentors with experience and knowledge towards business development. It gave us a more solid look on our own business, as we could count on the opinion of people that value the work we do as businessmen entrepreneurs,” Jaime Torres, CEO of UNK, explains.

UNK solves temperature and humidity problems in the food supply chain.

Up to the minute, the most relevant milestone has been the acquisition of partners and capital to continue developing the business of UNK in Chile and the rest of the world. “In 2021, an outstanding national family office joined the team with top-level executives to make UNK a world-class business,” adds the professional.

CROWDFUNDING

A COLLECTIVE FUNDING NETWORK THAT USUALLY OPERATES THROUGH THE INTERNET TO FINANCE PROJECTS. DURING THIS PROCESS, MANY PEOPLE INVEST A SMALL SUM IN EXCHANGE FOR A PRIZE OR PRODUCT. SOURCE: BOOK JUMP CHILE OF UC INNOVATION CENTER.

Source: Lab to market program of the Office of Transfer and Development.

[ ]

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

edu ca tion

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

BUSINESS MODEL

A TOOL TO CLEARLY IDENTIFY WHAT A PROJECT OFFERS, BY WHAT MEANS, TO WHAT AUDIENCE AND HOW IT WILL BE FINANCED. THERE ARE SEVERAL METHODOLOGIES TO CREATE A BUSINESS MODEL; SOME OF THEM ARE CANVAS AND LEAN CANVAS.

Source: Lab to market program of the Office of Transfer and Development.

edu ca tion

REVOLUTIONIZING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

INTERDISCIPLINE / MAFA innovation was developed by UC academics of Education and Design.

The Modeling the Physical Learning Environment (MAFA) initiative improves educational performance in the early childhood education classroom by enhancing the classroom environment and pedagogical relationships between educators, assistants and early childhood educators.

MAFA WITHOUT BORDERS

MAFA signed an alliance with Efecto Educativo, a licensee company to produce and commercialize innovation in Chile and the world.

In addition, the World Bank has taken it as an example for the creation of early childhood learning environments, work in which UC work team is already engaged with. Cynthia Adlerstein confesses: “Today MAFA is very set in classrooms, but today children do not only learn in the classroom. That is why we would like to bring it to preschools, to the neighborhood environment and show that any space can be a scenario for profound learning. That would be my dream.” The current challenge is to continue the scale up in the country and in Latin America, where learning environments in early childhood education are just beginning to be the focus of investment and to be seen as spaces in which children can exercise their citizenship.

Let’s imagine a flexible physical environment as an educational environment in which children can co-construct their learning spaces. If this entails possibilities to explore with all the senses, to learn by experimenting and to deliberate in order to collaborate, a frontier vision is created to approach the educational environments of early childhood.

The Modeling the Physical Learning Environment (MAFA) project is driven by an interdisciplinary team, and it creates spaces and places to learn and coexist. To this end, it eliminates tables, chairs, shelves and all of the traditional classroom furniture, and replaces it with assemblable wooden objects such as Meccano, that are lightweight, highly resistant and produce interactions which are very different from the usual ones in a conventional classroom.

“What traditional school furniture does is to sit children down, stop their bodies and force them to be in certain positions. On the other hand, MAFA builds very diverse practice supports that enhance different types of interactions of co-construction. Here, children can move, they can climb, see from different perspectives, but fundamentally they can decide how to organize their classroom for learning,” the academic Cynthia Adlerstein explains.

One of the many virtues of this educational technology is that the didactic resource is in children’s hands. Thus, they are the ones who imagine, deliberate and organize their spaces. They sit down to plan their learning spaces and negotiate these with adults. In doing so, they fill the given educational spaces with new meanings, take ownership of the classroom and inhabit it as protagonists, as authors.

The idea of MAFA was born when the Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles (JUNJI) contacted UC School of Design to commission furniture. As an innovative response, an interdisciplinary team led by academics Cynthia Adlerstein, from UC Faculty of Education, Patricia Manns and Alberto González, from UC School of Design, began working on a

technology to change the paradigm of traditional learning environments in Chilean early childhood education.

To this end, they synergistically integrated three components: a set of practice supports that replace traditional furniture especially designed for preschools; a MAFApp, which allows pedagogical documentation and the exchange of experiences among pedagogical teams within the preschools; and DiME, a didactic resource for girls and boys to participate in deliberating and modeling the design of their classrooms.

“To me, the pedagogical focus is highly relevant. There is no furniture if it is not for learning. Thus, we worked on bringing together these design notions with a pedagogical core to think about how we wanted children to grow, live and be in life,” Adlerstein remembers.

TRANSFORMING PUBLIC POLICY

One of the great challenges the MAFA team had to face was that academic innovation has time and rhythm that is very different from that of the State.

And since this new system was always intended for public early childhood education, establishing alliances with state agencies involved a lot of hard work. But it bore relevant fruits in different areas of the educational system and founded new understandings in Chilean early childhood education.

“We transformed public policy, the Chilean school furniture regulations, which were totally anachronistic. We have generated knowledge on learning environments of early childhood and we do not only apply it to the public

Chilean reality. We transferred it so it works in public preschools where quality environments are needed the most . Now, in addition, we are opening a new line that puts MAFA in the initial teacher training of early childhood educators, so that they can use this system when they enter the public sector,” the professor of the Faculty of Education adds.

Cynthia Adlerstein says that referring to this challenge, the support of UC was vital. Especially that of president Ignacio Sánchez, who gave them funds reserved by the President’s Office to install MAFA in UC preschools. “And that was super important, because the sons and daughters of the staff were amazed with that.”

The innovation was developed thanks to a Fondef project that finances the execution of scientific and technological research projects with potential economic and/or social impact. It also had the support of Edulab UC, the Laboratory for Innovation in Education, which is part of the Office of Transfer and Development of Universidad Católica.

“What traditional school furniture does is to sit children down, to stop their bodies and force them to be in certain positions. On the other hand, MAFA builds very diverse practice supports that enhance different types of interactions,” explains UC Faculty of Education academic.

MAFA TEAM / Cynthia Adlerstein, Alberto González and Patricia Manns.

CLOSING THE GAPS IN EDUCATION

“To provide every child and youth with access to quality education without their origin determining their future”: that is the principle that moves this non-profit organization.

Verónica Cabezas, one of its founders, notes that since 2008 they have been working to close the learning gaps between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. With this objective in mind, they recruit and select professionals of excellence in different areas who wish to work as teachers for two years in vulnerable schools in the country, with a permanent process of training and accompaniment.

FOUNDING TEAM /

Currently, they are present in 73 communes of 11 regions, with 218 teachers in the classrooms of 143 schools, to fulfill its mission: “To build a network of agents of change with the necessary conviction and perspective to impact the educational system, first from the classroom and then from different sectors of the system.”

Verónica Cabezas explains that for this purpose, they have alliances mainly with the

Tomás Recart, Verónica Cabezas, Claudio Seebach, Susana Claro (UC civil engineers), Francisco Lagos (UC psychologist), Bárbara Agliati (Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and Administrative Sciences and UC professor).

private sector and will continue to grow until they disappear: “In the long run, we shouldn’t exist, our work will be finished when we create an ample group of agents of change, enough to contribute inclosing the educational gaps,” she explains.

In the short term, they hope to have 180 new teachers teaching classes and strengthening their programs “Colegios que Aprenden” and “Canales Enseña”. In the longer run, they expect that its initial continuing education process will be recognized on a national and international level.

Fundación Enseña

Chile recruits professionals and teachers of excellence, coming from different areas, and who want to work as teachers for two years in vulnerable schools in the country.

THROUGHOUT CHILE / Enseña Chile is present in 143 schools in 11 regions of the country.

UC IS ALWAYS PRESENT

The six founders of Enseña Chile are Universidad Católica professionals – four civil engineers (Verónica Cabezas, Susana Claro, Tomás Recart and Claudio Seebach), one psychologist (Francisco Lagos) and one commercial engineer (Francisca Agliati), and everyone had the same idea based on their own experiences. Verónica Cabezas says that, when they found each other, they considered themselves “weirdos,” whilst some of them were doing their postgraduate studies in the United States , they were concerned about the challenges in education, although they came from different disciplines.

In addition to Universidad Católica and its Public Policy Center, which helped in promoting the project, they were inspired by Teach for America, the birthplace of Teach for All, with mentors who encouraged them to start.

ENGINEERING FOR EDUCATIONAL MANAGEMENT

Two UC engineers found a way to contribute to public education from their discipline and information systems.

As an engineer motivated by data analysis, Sebastián Arentsen came to monitor attendance at a public school in Santiago. There he found himself with a surprise: low efficiency of administrative processes and the lack of digitalization in the use of school information in order to make better decisions.

When he submitted his results, the principal of the establishment called the students’ parents who were at risk because of their repeated absences. He also congratulated head teachers, who were highlighted for their management. Something that seemed so simple for Sebastián, was a great contribution for education.

That is how the idea of Kimche was born, a technology enterprise in education (Saas EdTech Startup), founded in 2017, which set up operations in its first year at UC Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center, with the help of Arentsen and his partner Lucas Espinoza. This enterprise aims to help schools to make data-driven decisions, with the goal of supporting girls and boys to reach their full potential. In addition, through the use of new technologies, its services simplify pedagogical and administrative processes such as data analysis, school-family communication and marking evaluations.

On their development path, Kimche’s partners have encountered a number of challenges that discourage directors and teachers to initiate a culture of data use, such as the lack of knowledge regarding the importance of these or the idea that it “depersonalizes” the school.

COFUNDADORES DE KIMCHE / Sebastián Arentsen y Lucas Espinoza.

Kimche makes it easy for schools to make datadriven decisions, with the goal of supporting children to reach their full potential.

“These difficulties today lead schools to making decisions based on intuition, with insufficient and subjective information. Our great challenge as Kimche is to make technology the school’s ally, strengthening a culture of data use to ultimately impact the school trajectories of all of its students,” UC alumni point out.

During the initial years of this Enterprise, Sebastián and Lucas relied on UC and with UC Innovation Center as trustworthy endorsements. During the pandemic this

duo supported schools in their process of digitization and digital transformation that included a partner like Google for the installation, training and monitoring of virtual classrooms (Google Meet and Classroom). In addition, they contributed to the development of the digital class book, which enabled the complete digitalization of the school from a regulatory standpoint. Today, they are present in 500 establishments with BigData and Libro Digital technology.

SOCIAL LANGUAGE TEACHING

Not only does this online

platform teach mastering words in other languages,

but it also allows you to communicate with other students under

the guidance

Tof experts.

hrough a social learning method, Políglota has enabled more than 25,000 students of all Latin America to learn a new language. To this end, it combines small group conversation, guided by expert coaches on a theory-oriented platform. The participation in every group lasts one month. At the end of a session, the teacher evaluates every student’s skills and assesses if they are ready to move up one level. Through this approach, in just nine months a student can progress from not knowing anything about a language, to an intermediate level.

The initial idea of Políglota was of the friends Carlos Aravena (UC agronomist) and José Sánchez (UC engineer) –later joined by Nicolás Fuenzalida‒ , who had spent years studying languages but were not able to put it into practice and could not string together a sentence. “We realized that this problem wasn’t only happening to us: in Latin America barely 2% of the people can maintain a conversation in a second language,” Sánchez explains.

The first version was very different: it was a face-to-face community of groups that would

get together in bars and coffee shops to talk in another language. Over time and after several pivots it gained more academic momentum, until it became a first class service and remained loyal to the same community learning principles.

“Our dream is to achieve a more connected world thanks to languages, so our goal is global. Today we have a Hispano-American focus, with students of 15 different countries, more than 200 companies and more than 300 teachers in all parts of the world,” the founders report.

LEARNING ONLINE AND WITH NEW FRIENDS

Before the pandemic, Políglota functioned as a network of face-to-face learning groups. When the quarantines started happening, Políglota was part of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley business accelerator (where big start-ups such as Airbnb or Rappi came from). In addition, that same year Corfo selected it as the Start-up of the Year and the Global Education Awards awarded them the best Edtech of Latin America.

CO-FOUNDERS OF POLÍGLOTA

/ José Manuel Sánchez, Carlos Aravena and Nicolás Fuenzalida.

SUEÑALETRAS

EFFECTIVE INNOVATIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL INCLUSION

In the Centre for Development of Inclusion Technology , CEDETI, led by the academic of the Social Sciences Faculty Ricardo Rosas, created this free software with a worldwide impact that has helped millions of deaf children to learn how to read and write in their language.

RESISTANCE TO INNOVATION

“In the technological projects that we face, we find that there are many people who resist innovation in the education of deaf people. In our case, there has been skepticism that Sueñaletras could be used, that it could be useful, etc. But from the very beginning, we had strong support from the schools for the deaf, where they quickly saw the potential of this tool,” Professor Rosas explains.

RICARDO ROSAS / The academic of UC Psychology leads the interdisciplinary team of Sueñaletras.

The psychologist and director of CEDETI Ricardo Rosas explains: “Deaf people have a great challenge when it comes to learning how to read, because we know reading as a direct, one-to-one conversion from speech sounds to letters.” He explains the problem that thousands of small children deal with on a daily basis in Chile and in the world. “Since deaf people don’t know speech sounds, they must learn a code from which they do not have the sensory experience to support their learning.”

In our country, the Second National Study of Disability (2015) showed that there are almost three million people with disabilities. Of this total, 23.7% experience some degree of hearing loss (712,005), and almost two hundred thousand are completely deaf. Despite our society’s efforts towards further inclusion, there is still a long way to break down persistent barriers.

Not until 2015 Law Nº 21.303 was enacted. It promotes the use of sign language in education, the job market, in health and other areas. Through this law, the State recognizes sign language as “the official language of deaf people.”

In addition, the regulation stated that education for deaf students must guarantee access to all of the content of the common

“Deaf people have tremendous difficulty learning to read, because reading as we know it is a direct, one-to-one conversion of speech sounds to letters,” explains psychologist Ricardo Rosas.

MORE TECHNOLOGIES /

The CEDETI has specialized in the development of educational software.

curriculum, although that they learn to read and write first.

Aware of this reality, in 2007 a multidisciplinary team of psychologists, educators and designers –led by Ricardo Rosas– developed Sueñaletras an initiative for reading in blind people. It is an app that functions as a support program for teachers, its purpose is to teach reading and writing to deaf and hearing-impaired children aged between four and ten years.

This software uses a combination of resources to enhance reading comprehension, such as videos in sign language, fingerprint activities and lip-reading representation, which are presented in combination with texts.

“Users have a series of possibilities to play with words, break them down in their letter components, so that they will learn how to put the letters together in the Spanish language, because for them, Spanish is a foreign language,” Ricardo Rosas explains.

TO THE WORLD

Sueñaletras has also proven to be successful in children with other educational special needs and it was distinguished with the 2011 WISE Awards, which the Qatar Foundation awarded it as one of the six most important educational initiatives in the world.

Since then, its versions have been utilized in almost twenty countries. It also features special adaptations in Argentine and Catalan, and its interface is in five different languages.

“Every country has a different sign language, so in reality you have to do a Sueñaletras for each one,” Professor Rosas explains.

For its development, resources have been granted from Universidad Católica and from institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the Gallaudet University of the United States, the first school of advanced education for deaf and hearing-impaired people in the world.

Currently, the largest partner of Sueñaletras is the IQRA Foundation, a Pakistani NGO that attends to a million hearing-impaired children. The app’s software can be downloaded for free from the CEDETI website.

“What we sell as an institution is the evaluation technology, directed to professionals in education, but Sueñaletras is not a commercial product and it has the hallmark of Universidad Católica. The UC Innovation Center and the Office of Transfer and Development have been our great driving force. We could hardly have done all of this without the support of an institution such as UC,” Rosas concludes.

A GAME TO LEARN HOW TO RESEARCH

A group of UC academics, professionals and students created a kit of didactic activities to help youths develop research skills.

Motivated by UC Teaching Improvement and Innovation Fund (Fondedoc), Professor Milena Grass of the School of Theater, along with the independent researcher Pablo Cisternas, the academic of the School of Design Pedro Alvaréz, the research coordinator Isabel Sierralta, and the then students Javier Ramírez and Francisca Torres of the School of Design, combined their disciplinary knowledge to create Polimorfes, a kit of didactic activities to develop research skills.

Polimorfes uses figures and transparencies to train description and organization.

Aimed at high school and undergraduate students, it consists of two parts; 3D figures and transparencies that enable developing research skills; and cards with key questions that approach the formulation of research proposals.

The initiative was so successful that it obtained financing through a contest organized

by Edulab UC and Bioquimica.cl, a company that provides products and services for scientific education. In fact, this online retailer licensed the innovation and today has the distribution rights to Polimorfes.

“UC financed the first stage of the project through a Fondedoc of the Academic Vice-presidency. That is how we managed to develop a prototype. Later, thanks to the funds of the contest Impact on Education of Edulab and Bioquimica.cl, we put the game into a mass production condition. The Academic Vice-presidency gifted 40 Polimorfes to schools in Pirque. All intellectual property, covenant and right work was overseen by the Office of Transfer and Development,” Professor Milena Grass says.

THE CREATORS OF THE GAME / Isabel Sierralta, Pedro Álvarez, Pablo Cisternas and Milena Grass, the Polimorfes team.

WHAT IS A FONDEDOC?

The purpose of this competitive fund is to support and make visible projects, proposals or solutions that respond to a need or problem, generating an improvement or significant innovation in teaching practices. The projects’ ultimate goal is to achieve better or greater learnings in the student community.

Edulab UC is a program of the Office of Transfer and Development of the Vice-Presidency for Research, which promotes the transformation of scientific research of the university’s teams, into innovative educational solutions to improve the quality of education in Chile and the world.

THE TRANSFER TO SOCIETY / The Polimorfes innovation was licensed by the Bioquimica.cl Company.

TRAINING PRACTICAL SKILLS REMOTELY

This platform transforms on-site training of an institution into a digital and remote experience, it enables training any procedure or psychomotor skill, supervised by teacher networks and in an asynchronous manner.

THE SUPPORT OF UC

“I always had the support of my bosses in UC –the deans, the President, the Vice President– and they have also given me strategic tools for the development of my project. In addition, having a certification from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile greatly enhances this particular business model,” Julián Varas says.

UC SPIN-OFF / C1DO1 is a company created to commercialize research results.

Since the beginning of this career in 2010, Doctor Julián Varas was interested in medical simulation, a medical specialization in which he was trained as soon as he finished his undergraduate studies. It has led him to become one of the leading experts in the country, in the design and validation of surgical training programs with simulation.

As a surgeon, associate professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, medical manager of UC Center for Simulation and Experimental Surgery, and as a result of his work and research, he created Training & Competence, a spin-off company dedicated to facilitating institutions in the teaching of medical competencies. “I’ve always been intrigued by being able to reach more people and that what you do does not end up as just a local experiment. It requires different thinking and the one that best adapts can become a fast growing company,” he explains.

Training & Competence’s main development is C1DO1 (which sounds like ‘see one, do one’) an experiential learning platform using tele-feedback, allowing training of any psychomotor procedure or skill supervised by teaching networks, asynchronously.

As they learn, students receive in their own video drawings, audio, text or other complementary videos, such as inputs. And then they practice again until they do the procedure well. Through these multimedia tools, academics transfer skills to students through effective feedback.

Lapp, a course in C1DO1 of UC, allows remote training in laparoscopic surgery, im -

proving student’s skills. Trained teachers can correct the performed exercises, using a simple evaluation system.

“Telesimulation consists of each student or surgeon recording their surgical procedure with the specialized equipment, uploading the video through the C1DO1 phone application and sending it for peer review anywhere in the world,” the researcher Julián Varas explains.

Remote feedback training was not formally inserted into medical school curricula until after the pandemic and became an effective educational tool.

“It was pretty good for us to precisely be able to show that the world does have the technology and the ability to adapt to this new reality. And one of the ways to do it is through us,” he highlights. “During the pandemic many institutions were abandoned, because although the world of e-learning is very theoretical and knowledge-based, it is also about doing, and it is one of the areas to which we are most dedicated,” he adds.

PROJECTIONS

The main universities of our country, such as Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Austral, Católica del Norte, Católica del Maule and La Frontera, have already adopted this platform with the support of the center of technological transfer HubTec and UC DTD.

Thanks to C1DO1, UC continuing education laparoscopy courses are taught in 15 cities and 8 countries, including the USA and Tanzania. In addition, it is growing in

Medical simulation has been used in our country for years and its formal insertion in the curricula of medical schools was just beginning when the pandemic struck. It was promoted as an effective educational tool.

ACADEMIC AND ENTREPRENEUR /

Julián Varas is an academic in Medicine and CEO of the spin-off company.

UNDERTAKE

“It’s not an easy step, on the contrary, it is very difficult for people like us, doctors, because we are not prepared to undertake. In order to be able to do so, I surrounded myself with many mentors to gradually understand. You have to be stubborn and know that you are going to fail many times, that you are going to be corrected and that you are going to improve. That is what happened to me as the CEO of Training & Competence,” Varas says.

areas such as kinesiology, phonoaudiology, nursing and in professional institutes.

“Complementary to what we do, and as we move forward, new challenges and business models are emerging. For example, with the data we are obtaining we can gradually start to automate courses, include artificial intelligence in evaluations, generate complementary feedback to teachers through artificial intelligence, etc. Everything has to do with optimizing someone’s learning. We try to contribute with each research question, with our grain of sand. We are growing and seeing that we can indeed train in a better way,” doctor Varas concludes.

SUPPORTING EDUCATION IN VULNERABLE SCHOOLS

DaleProfe is an initiative that is born under the wings of LarraínVial Foundation, an organization created by the financial institution of the same name, as a way to contribute to the community through management, volunteering and funding programs that seek to improve education.

In this crowdfunding platform, teachers that work in vulnerable schools and contexts in Chile can promote projects that seek to improve their students’ learning, so that anyone can support them by making a donation. The teachers register in DaleProfe, upload their project and can receive donations. When the funding goal is achieved, the materials required by the teacher are purchased and sent to the facility, so that they can carry out their project.

“Since the platform launched, we invited Elige Educar, a public-private initiative that works under the wings of the Center of Public Policies of Universidad Católica, to be our strategic ally. Not only has it given visibility and promotion amongst many teachers, but it also enables to get to know their necessities and interests better.” Francisca Medeiros, UC commercial engineer and general manager of LarraínVial Foundation.

With DaleProfe, school teachers can present projects to improve education in vulnerable contexts.

NETWORKING

FACE-TO-FACE OR VIRTUAL MEETING OF PEOPLE WITH SIMILAR INTERESTS, IN WHICH A CONTACT NETWORK CAN BE BUILD THAT HELPS STRENGTHEN A BUSINESS.

Source: Lab to market program of UC Office of Transfer and Development.

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

heal th & well be ing

ONE PAGER

SUPPORTING EDUCATION IN VULNERABLE SCHOOLS

DCONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION [ ]

aleProfe is an initiative that is born under the wings of LarraínVial Foundation, an organization created by the financial institution of the same name, as a way to contribute to the community through management, volunteering and funding programs that seek to improve education.

With DaleProfe, school teachers can present projects to improve education in vulnerable contexts.

AN EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF THE COMPANY OR PROJECT THAT SHOULD OCCUPY ONLY ONE SIDE OF A SHEET. IT IS THE LETTER OF INTRODUCTION FOR STARTUPS WHEN THEY MAKE THEMSELVES KNOWN TO AUDIENCES IN WHICH THEY WANT TO RAISE INTEREST. THIS DOCUMENT IS KEY WHEN RAISING FUNDING WITH INVESTORS.

Source: Lab to market program of UC Office of Transfer and Development.

heal th & well be ing

VIRUS HUNTERS

After the pandemic, Doctor Alexis Kalergis continues to focus on the vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus, the main cause of illness every winter.

INVENTORS AND INNOVATORS / Susan Bueno, Pablo González and Alexis Kalergis, co-founders of Biothervax.

UC SUPPORT

RSV is not everything and, alongside his team, Doctor Kalergis is also perfecting his vaccine to combat the Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV), described for the first time in Holland in 2001, which generates repeated and acute respiratory infections. This development has had good results in preclinical models and its details have been already published in several high-impact magazines, such as the prestigious The Journal of Immunology, considered to be one of the 100 most influential in the history of international science. This vaccine has been formulated according to good manufacturing practices with the support of the Consortium in Biomedicine and Corfo.

The pandemic made very clear the consequences that at any moment, viruses can bring to mankind, a matter of which Doctor Alexis Kalergis knows very well.

The researcher leads Biothervax, a spin-off company of Universidad Católica, created in order to facilitate the arrival on the vaccine market and immunotherapies produced at UC, such as the vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to be applied to newborns and the elderly. The invention has been protected through invention patents in Chile and abroad.

After the parenthesis of the coronavirus that led him and his team to participate in the Sinovac vaccine production, the researcher has resumed his projects. He has been working for 18 years in combating the disease that still leads winter illnesses in Chile and also attacks an important part of the world.

“The respiratory syncytial virus is a high-impact problem in public health and mainly harms the health of children and elderly people, for whom the associated pneumonia can be life-threatening,” Doctor Kalergis explains.

RSV also carries many related costs and enormous stress for those affected, from the difficult process of infection and contagion, to the suffering of parents and family, and absenteeism from work, among others. In short, it is a major social problem, for which, according to the academic, the answer lies in a “science whose mission is social welfare.”

A COMPLEX ROUTE

The idea of developing a vaccine against RSV was born in Alexis Kalergis in 2004, when, upon returning to Chile after a period of study and work in the United States, he witnessed a very intense winter outbreak of the disease, with cases close to him. “Friends and family have suffered from this virus. We still have a lot left to study and learn from this microbe. We hope that the experience

gained with the pandemic will lead us to advance quickly in the development of a vaccine against the syncytial virus,” he explains.

How much longer? “We are very close, but we still have a long way to go. We are currently implementing Phase II studies in accordance with national and international regulatory standards and are moving forward to complete the remaining milestones,” the researcher explains.

The route has not been without difficulties which, in a broad concept, Dr. Kalergis defines as “positive and constructive complexities” because they are a stimulus for his work.

In terms of financing, receiving support from competitive public and private sources is a sign that the technology’s quality and the science behind it, allows it to compete successfully.

For example, together with UC, Biothervax has obtained support from the StartUp Ciencia and Alta Tecnología programs for the implementation of methodologies in a GMP lab (Good Manufacturing Practice according to the acronym) in UC Innovation Center, for the production of vaccines for Phase I and/ or II scientific-clinical studies in Chile in humans. It is expected that with the work of this new laboratory, it will be able to advance in the development of vaccines made in Chile in accordance with the regulations.

“Another element that I would call a positive complexity, has been the linkage with the State. We believe that this vaccine should be considered a public asset. This is why, since the beginning of this project we have

informed the Ministry of Health of the scientific and clinical advances in the development of this vaccine,” he explains.

Without a doubt, UC has played a fundamental role in all of this. “We’ve received cross-cutting support with the involvement of the faculties of Biological Sciences, Medicine, Chemistry and Communications, of all of the institutions through the work of students, academics and office workers. As well as from the Senior Management through the support of the Office of Transfer and Development of the Vice Presidency of Research of UC Innovation Center. The university consists of a network of people with different skills and we achieve progress when we work together collaboratively,” Alexis Kalergis finishes.

INNOVATION ACCORDING TO KALERGIS

“Innovation is the result of a scientific creation that is many times based on curiosity. And after this, the hard work of transforming the result of the creation into a product that allows us to face a problem that affects society, a technology transfer process, continues. Thus, in the case of innovation being creative is not enough, it also takes perseverance and resilience. Personally, I am convinced that innovation should have social wellbeing as a fundamental inspiration.”

PUBLIC ASSET / Biothervax and the Ministry of Health seek to extend the use of the vaccine in all of Chile.

THE SPONGE THAT PROMOTES BREAST SELF-EXAMINATION

Josefa Cortés, UC design alumni, is the creator of Palpa, a device that seeks to detect breast cancer thanks to an ingenious and applauded system.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Apart from the UC Innovation Center contest, Palpa won a Corfo fund, the second place in Challenges in Cancer Latam, and was a finalist in 2020, in the BRAIN Chile program. In January 2021, Josefa Cortés was awarded by El Mercurio and the UAI as one of the 100 young leaders of 2020, an appointment that encouraged her to continue promoting entrepreneurship and to scale the production of her innovation. She has also had international acknowledgements: she became a semi-finalist for the Index Award, the largest design award in the world. In 2022, the MIT Technology Review in Spanish selected her as one of the 35 Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2022. And at the end of that year, Mujeres Empresarias, together with the newspaper El Mercurio, recognized her as one of the 100 Women Leaders of 2022.

CONTAINER OF LIQUID SOAP / The device seeks to simulate the sensation of palpating a malignant tumor in the breast.

She was close to starting her Design degree project in UC, when a news story hit Josefa Cortés: a person very close to her had been diagnosed with breast cancer. “She was 52 years old, had felt something weird, but thought it was a fat ball,” she remembers. “The incredible thing is that she had palpated it years ago, but thought it was something normal and let it be.”

This case led her to reflecting on young women, such as herself, that can have a tumor, but who are not screened annually by mammography. That is how the objective of her degree project was born: promote breast self-examination.

During the research, Josefa discovered that out of every 10 confirmed cases of breast cancer, three were in women under 40. In addition, when reviewing the marketing campaigns on this disease, she realized that women, especially the younger ones, had not been educated.

“My idea was always to create something that could be included in the daily routine. That is how I got to the shower, an intimate place where one has access to your body. In addition, it is the ideal space, because doctors recommend doing the self-examination with soap or moisturizer to have a better glide on the skin,” she details.

With these concepts she created Palpa: a breast made of soft material, like a sponge, that is filled with liquid soap and which has the simulation of a malignant tumor in its interior. The goal is that women examine that feeling to then be able to differentiate what occurs in their bodies.

After preparing an artisanal prototype for the submission of her degree, Josefa won the contest of UC Innovation Center to attend the Emerge Américas startup fair in Miami. This experience encouraged her to develop the project in a more professional manner and to embark on this venture.

“Initially, the focus was on selling to women directly, but then we realized that there is a

tremendous potential in companies, entities and the government, because they can take charge of the problem by delivering the product on a massive-scale. Our goal is to reach as many women as possible, even though we’re never going to rule out the option of a woman buying by her own means.”

In the first stage, the Palpa kit was sold directly to the public. In October 2021, after a first round of investment from family & friends, a new version of the device was launched, created with recyclable products, durable and much cheaper than the previous one. “We want to reach 75,000 women, mainly through the brands that are already joining the campaign,” she explains.

For Josefa Cortés, her training as a UC designer has been fundamental for the success of Palpa. “They always gave us a comprehensive view at the undergraduate level, they taught us never to see things separately, but as a project. And I think that is what we do in Palpa, see everything in 360°. While we have to be profitable to be a company that can grow, we can never leave aside the 100% social impact, reaching out to women who need it most. The training

THESIS PROJECT /

Palpa is born from the design degree project of Josefa, guided by professor Bernardita Figueroa.

that Design in Universidad Católica gave me is unique.”

THE STEPS AHEAD

Josefa Cortés is already designing the internationalization plan of Palpa.

To this end, she has had meetings in the United States to find the best way to enter that market. “If you ask me how I see Palpa in five more years, I would like to make an alliance with the United Nations and be able to go to India to train all women, but before that, there are previous steps of positioning, of being able to scale and enter new markets, and for that the view is outside,” UC designer reflects.

Her goal is for the device to reach foreign markets to be 100% competitive, even with other types of sponge which can be sold in retail and competes with traditional bath products.

Josefa asks herself: “What happens if we ally with a powerful brand of soaps in the United States and thus naturally position ourselves as another beauty product?” Why not, she welcomes the challenges.

TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE SPORTS PERFORMANCE

AN INNOVATING TEAM / Agustín Macaya, Vader Johnson, Bruno Moreno, Andrés Mellado, Consuelo Soto and Daniel Hurtado, the members of IC Innovation.

Developed by the professor of the School of Engineering and of UC Institute of Biological Engineering Daniela Hurtado –together with the CEO of IC Innovations, Vader Johnson- , this electronic device, which is worn attached to the body, allows to monitor the respiratory activity of athletes and trainers to adjust the rhythm of their routines and thus improve their sports performance.

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE / The device is a sensor that is used under the nose and is connected to an app.

What is a wearable? It’s a smart electronic device that is incorporated into the clothing or which is used corporeally as implants or accessory, which can act as an extension of the body or mind of the user. CHASKi is a respiratory wearable device that enables monitoring sports performance of high performance athletes.

The device democratizes the access to professional training, as it provides physiological metrics that allow the design of optimal exercise routines.

It is initially thought for trainers and athletes in the world of running, marathon, cycling and triathlon, in which training seeks to increase physical endurance based on exercise routines based on customized intensity zones.

The idea was born almost three years ago, when Hurtado and Johnson were developing a technology for non-invasive respiratory monitoring of hospitalized patients. In this way they visualized a high potential for its application in the world of sports.

This innovative application was born from conversations with professionals in the world of sports and investors, who mentioned that

RUNNING TO THE FINISH LINE

The current team of CHASKi, co-led by professor Daniel Hurtado, consists of seven professionals and several external collaborators in the world of sports science. The project already had a commercial launch in Chile with the first generation of this product. Before that, the commercial prototype was tested by 11 cycling and running teams in Chile, and one team in the United States. The patent application behind CHASKi is in domestic phases in the US and China.

CHASKi’s plans are to conquer on a global level the world of sports by providing a unique technology at the service of athletes who want to beat their records.

this technology could have uses in the world of high performance sport.

“We’ve had many difficulties along the way. Maybe too many and which I could not finish telling here. But, in short, some of the most important challenges have been to build, rebuild and to maintain over time a first class work team, raise financing and advance the transition to an enterprise through multiple negotiations with the University and with the licensors of this technology,” Daniel Hurtado comments.

“The technology behind CHASKi was born from applied research that we developed in my laboratory, in UC Engineering and in collaboration with Professor Angel Abusleme, from seed funding provided by the Office of Transfer and Development, an applied research project funded by the Copec-UC Foundation, the support of HubTec, and a Corfo technology packaging project developed through Dictuc S.A. All of this also

allowed us to apply for a patent that protects this technology, and the University supported us during the whole process,” Daniel Hurtado says.

During 2021 and incubated within UC, they created the spin-off company that CHASKi currently develops. Its launch in Chile started at the end of 2022, and its short-term goal is to consolidate sales in Chile and validate the product and its traction in the sporting world.

In the short term, and once the previous aim has been achieved, the company’s goal is to scale up production and launch in the United States and other international markets.

In the future, they intend to conquer the world of sports by providing a unique technology at the service of athletes who want to beat their records. They estimate that in the U.S. and Europe alone there is a total available market of over 30 million athletes, where CHASKi can have a great impact.

THE BIOMATERIAL OF THE FUTURE FOR BONE GRAFTS

By combining their expertise, UC Professors Álex Vargas and Jorge Ramos created an innovative biomaterial for bone grafts.

INNOVATION THAT IS BORN FROM THE INTERDISCIPLINARY / Álex Vargas from Medicine and Jorge Ramos from Engineering are the inventors of the technology.

CORFO ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

In 2021, Geodbone Biotech was selected by ChileMass Emprende (Corfo) to participate in an international mentorship in Boston, with the goal of getting to know the market, receive feedback and obtain strategic allies for the technology at its current stage.

SYNTHETIC PARTICLE /

The innovation enables rapid bone regeneration and reduces the risk of infection.

As a dentist and maxillofacial surgeon, the professor of UC Faculty of Medicine, Dr. Álex Vargas, has more than 30 years of experience in his field. That is how he was able to verify the non-existence of an ideal biomaterial for bone grafts.

For this reason, after working together with the professor of UC Faculty of Engineering, Jorge Ramos, they carried out a Fondef project in which they developed and managed rapid prototyping technology, the road to follow became more evident: they both could design and manufacture biocompatible bone grafts using 3D printing. And they succeeded.

That is how Geodbone Biotech was born, a science and technology-based company whose purpose is to improve the quality of life of people who have suffered bone defects due to tumor, cystic and traumatic lesions, through biotechnological innovations.

“Currently, we are devoted to the development of a new biomaterial of bone graft, consisting of a geodesic particle manufactured by rapid prototyping with 3D technology, and whose shape and surface favor bone regeneration and reduce the risk of infection and rejection. The technology facilitates

the other hand, public funds are scarce in biotechnology. Currently, we are in a phase where the technology is more than an idea, but not mature enough to scale. And that phase has few financing alternatives,” Vargas explains.

Therefore UC support has been significant for the researchers. For example, they have participated in several programs of internal support, such as the Concurso Patentar para Transferir, promoted by the Office of Transfer and Development of the Vice Presidency for Research. They have also participated in BRAIN Chile (a program that accelerates science and technology-bases ventures, promoted by UC Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center, the School of UC Engineering and

With the joint work of professors of UC Medicine and Engineering, Geodbone was born with the purpose of designing and manufacturing biocompatible bone grafts using 3D printing.

successful implants, both in the dental and orthopedic areas,” professor Vargas details and adds that this innovation has an accessible cost for patients.

Even though the pandemic meant a significant delay in the development of the research for Geodbone Biotech, especially with the closure of University laboratories due to quarantines of the last two years, the company has managed to file patent applications in Chile, United States, Europe and Brazil. In addition, it has a GLP Laboratory that will allow developing its project in optimal conditions with a goal of FDA certification, the agency that regulates the safety of these types of innovations on an international level.

“One of the most important difficulties we have faced is financing. It is difficult to provide guarantees to private investors when the project is at such an early stage and, on

UC Office of Transfer and Development, together with Banco Santander), Global UC, Red de Mentores and the spin-off Committee, among others, which has allowed them to transmit the idea in the form of a pitch and to have a structured business model.

Another contribution has been the partnerships and connections to apply to various funding programs, such as Corfo Innova, the Copec-UC Foundation and the connection with UC MBA Program, through which they received mentoring from a group of students. Currently, one of them, Nicole González, leads the enterprise as an CEO of the project.

Geodbone Biotech intends to get this innovation validated to enter the market, to scale internationally and impact the quality of life of people who require successful implants, since current technologies are very expensive and the results are not satisfactory enough .

A SIMULATOR THAT TRAINS SKILLS IN THE HEALTH AREA

Academics from UC Engineering and Medicine developed an intravenous puncture simulator to solve the problems involved in teaching these skills.

“UC promotes contact between academics from different faculties and through its competitive funds it is possible to meet people, interact and look for coincidences. That is how we met Doctor Constanza Miranda and started working together. The support of the University has been tremendously important, both for the generation of funding as well as for all the knowledge it has provided,” Fernando Altermatt says.

SAFE TEACHING / Simulmedic consists of a software and a simulation phantom.

Students in health careers –physicians, professionals and technicians– require acquiring skills of certain procedures that can be invasive, uncomfortable and even dangerous for the patients.

Due to this, the schools in which they study use clinical simulation, with the following problem: many times the availability of the trainers is tremendously depleted. In addition, the time of these highly qualified professionals is used in academic work, when in practice they should be performing clinical work and attending patients.

This has been particularly dramatic and evident during the pandemic, added to the enormous burden of existing waiting lists which increased in this period. This is where the work of Simulmedic is fundamental.

“Our company seeks to solve these inconveniences, using a peripheral venous puncture simulator that also provides autonomous feedback to the trainee,” Doctor Fernando Altermatt, founding partner of Simulmedic and associate professor at the School of Medicine of Universidad Católica, explains.

Together with the Engineering academic and doctor in design Constanza Miranda, Altermatt developed this simulation software and hardware (phantom) to learn how to perform successful intravenous punctures with blood collection and line placement, which provides objective measures of compliance. The third founding partner is Gonzalo Gho, CEO of the project, whose addition was one of the company’s milestones.

Simulmedic helps to reduce the risk of committing mistakes on real patients, thanks to its model based on an “arm” with sensors, which provides information in real time about the procedure and registers it on a platform for tracking and storing results.

It also optimizes students’ learning and trainers’ time, making both processes more efficient. As a result, students can acquire skills without risking real patients’ integrity whilst also having the opportunity to reach levels of competence in a much safer environment. Meanwhile, trainers are left with a freer schedule and the capacity to reach several trainees simultaneously.

Product development was mainly financed by the Copec-UC Foundation and already has a patent in Chile and in the United States. The next steps? “To be able to raise capital to grow and make our first sales on a large scale. We are in talks with some universities and vocational schools. And while we are in a time of uncertainty, we are very optimistic,” Doctor Altermatt concludes.

IN PANDEMIC

“We started off as a small project and we finally succeeded in making a small company through a spin-off in Dictuc S.A. The pandemic brought many difficulties, but it also gave us an opportunity to send our simulator to the homes of students training autonomously. Thus we proved that we weren’t so lost with our proposal,” Fernando Altermatt remembers.

THE TEAM /

From left to right, Fernando Altermatt, Constanza Miranda and Gonzalo Gho.

AN ACCURATE TEST FOR SKIN INFECTIONS

UC biochemist Carolina Cabalín, together with the professor of Medicine Arturo Borzutzky, are working on solving a global problem: non-invasive diagnosis of pathogens affecting the skin.

Skin infections are on a global level an enormous problem in public health. However, its diagnosis generally continues to be empiric, without identifying specific pathogens, which leads to the use of broad spectrum antibiotics.

To solve this problem, MicrobeSkin was born, a rapid, non-invasive, multiplex molecular diagnostic test for pathogens and biomarkers of skin infections that, in 24 hours or less, will also reveal the presence of some antimicrobial treatment resistance genes.

The creator of this innovation is Carolina Cabalín, who in her undergraduate thesis of UC Biochemistry, carried out at the Laboratory of Translational Immunology and Allergy directed by Dr. Arturo Borzutzky, did a study pilot to standardize non-invasive skin sampling without biopsy and for the discovery of biomarkers that differentiate colonization from bacterial infection.

This project received public financing of the FONDEF VIU Stage I and Stage II. This is how this idea, which began in 2016, has continued developing. In 2022, the biotechnology company InverSkin, founded by the

developing team of this technology, was awarded the Startup Ciencia, Corfo Crea y Valida I+D, Fondos concursables Copec-UC, among others, to perform a diagnostic, commercial and intellectual property validity analysis of MicrobeSkin.

“It was our participation in the scientific accelerator BRAIN Chile –where we reached

SIMPLE AND NON-INVASIVE / The clinical exam identifies the pathogen and the quality of skin against an infection.

the finals– which transformed us into enterprising scientists. We decided to expand the team –incorporating Dr. Nicole Le Corre, professor of Medicine– , we validated the real problem surrounding the diagnosis of skin infections and decided to embark on the road to technology transfer,” Carolina, founder of InverSkin and doctor candidate in Medical Sciences, explains.

AUDIENCE AWARD IN BRAIN CHILE

MicrobeSkin was selected among the eight best teams during the stage of acceleration of BRAIN Chile and received two million pesos as capital to validate their business model and prototype. In the final stage, the eight finalist teams exhibited in the prototype fair and presented their technologies in a pitch format to the public and investors. Thanks to the attendees’ votes , they won a bonus prize of two million pesos.

Today, the researchers are focused on finalizing the prototype for the exam to then clinically validate it. Having achieved this, they will be able to implement it as an exam.

“UC has been a very important pillar for the development of this project, especially for the support of the team of the Office of Transfer and Development, and UC Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center. The fact that the University

MicrobeSkin is a rapid, non-invasive, multiplex molecular diagnostic test for pathogens and biomarkers of skin infections that, in 24 hours or less, will also reveal the presence of some antimicrobial treatment resistance genes.

has these platforms and actively organizes activities such as BRAIN Chile, creates an environment conducive to the realization of initiatives coming from the academy and into the industry,” the scientific entrepreneur states.

If everything goes well, soon MicrobeSkin will start to commercialize in Chile and in highly competitive global markets, such as the United States and Europe.

ACCELERATION /

The team was one of the winners of the BRAIN Chile program in 2019.

STIMULATING BREATHING IN PREMATURE INFANTS

UC designer María Jesús Álvarez created a prototype that allows babies’ backs to be gently stimulated to prevent sleep apnea.

INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAM / The neonatologist Paulina Toso and the designer María Jesús Álvarez lead Pimún.

Acommon fear among mothers and fathers is that their newborns stop breathing during their sleep. The socalled “sudden death” has been a challenge to medicine for generations and today you can find sensors warning the absence of breathing, but they do not prevent it.

Designer María Jesús Álvarez was researching on newborns’ emotional regulation for her undergraduate thesis, when in one interview with a psychologist she stumbled upon a concept she found fascinating: cardiorespiratory synchrony.

This phenomenon allows babies, who are incapable of achieving emotional regulation on their own, to feel in their bodies the respiratory frequency of their caretakers and to calm down because of it.

María Jesús was able to link this great sensitivity to touch with the risk of suffering sleep apneas, a condition that increases in premature infants. That is how Pimún was born; a medical device to prevent this problem, which is a shirt that softly stimulates the baby’s back and accompanies them while they sleep.

As this is an invention that requires health knowledge, the designer teamed up with UC academic Paulina Toso, who is also head of the Neonatology Service at UC Christus Hospital. In addition to being a cofounder, Paulina is the director of research and medical studies of the startup.

The team developed the first functional prototype of Pimún with certified materials and safety tests. As a result, they have already been awarded an invention patent in Chile and currently are in the national stages in the United States, Europe, China, Brazil and Mexico.

VITAL COMPANIONSHIP

“Thanks to the University we have been able to form a multidisciplinary team and they also supported us in the awarding of a Fondef IDeA,” María Jesús Álvarez says.

“We did a pilot with 10 premature infants at UC Christus Hospital. We tested the action mechanism of Pimún, measured comfort, sleep-wake cycle, changes in vital signs and whether there is a synchrony between the stimulation given on the child’s back and their breathing rate,” María Jesús says.

This experience is only one of the supports UC has given to the project. “Thanks to the University we have been able to form a multidisciplinary team. It also supported us in the awarding of a Fondef IDeA. UC Office of Transfer and Development has been a great help in the field of intellectual property and in our establishment as a spin-off,” the inventor notes. In addition, in 2019 they became one of the finalist teams in the BRAIN Chile program.

The plans of Pimún are related to the continuation of medical studies that will allow it to adjust its operation and to the solution of the regulatory difficulties in order to launch this medical device in Chile. Therefore, in the short term they will prioritize its launching in the United States and then design a strategy to enter the Latin American market.

OPTIMAL DOSE

Pimún is conducting a pilot study to measure the optimal stimulation dose according to each child’s weight. The results will involve redesigning the prototype so that experts using it enter the newborn’s body mass, and the device will automatically deliver the most suitable tactile stimulation.

PILOT WITH 20 PATIENTS /

The study is validating the efficacy and safety of the device in newborns in UC Christus Network.

Pimún prevents sleep apnea in premature infants and consists of a shirt that softly stimulates the baby’s back and accompanies them while they sleep.

A QUICK TEST TO DETECT GASTRIC CANCER

Doctor Alejandro Corvalán discovered how to identify tumors and lesions through a blood sample. And with his team turned this innovation into an high-impact enterprise.

Currently, in order to detect gastric cancer it is necessary to make a biopsy through an exam that requires patient sedation: Upper Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. But a group of scientists and entrepreneurs want to change history and are already developing the first liquid biopsy test based on methylated DNA for the non-invasive detection of gastric cancer, using a predictive model based on artificial intelligence. As a result, with only one blood sample and even without symptoms, a stomach tumor or lesions that could evolve into gastric cancer, can be detected. The results are dynamic and show the cumulative presence of tumors over time.

The company in charge of this development is Ilico Genetics, a spin-off of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. “The purpose of this innovation, which is protected through invention patents , is to reverse the poor prognosis of gastric cancer and positively

impact on patients and their families’ lives, through the development of genomic solutions,” Fernando Alarcón, co-founder and CEO, explains.

This Enterprise was born from technology developed in the Oncology Laboratory of UC with funding from Conicyt’s Fondef Applied R&D Competition, currently ANID. In 2019, Alejandro Corvalán, academic of UC School of Medicine and main researcher, sought advice from Fernando Alarcón, consultant of ATRUS Advisors, with the purpose of turning the clinical potential of these discoveries into a business plan.

In parallel, after obtaining her Master’s degree in Medical Sciences from Universidad de Valparaiso, María José Maturana, co-founder and COO of Ilico Genetics, was awarded a Fondef VIU project which significantly reduced the operational costs of the test.

In 2020 they reached the final of BRAIN Chile, an experience in which they validated the business assumptions and confirmed that not only did they have a technology with tremendous potential to save the lives of millions of people around the world, whilst saving health care systems billions of dollars, but they also had a team with the ability to transform a research project into an innovation enterprise.

“We are working on creating collaboration agreements with clinical and research centers in Costa Rica, Colombia and Nicaragua, to include them in our multicenter clinical study. This will allow us to perform the test with heterogeneous population samples,” Alarcón details.

Ilico

Genetics is already developing the first methylated DNA-based liquid biopsy test for the noninvasive detection of gastric cancer, using an artificial intelligence-based predictive model.

The main difficulties they have faced are related to being new in the biotechnology industry. “In a short period we had to understand the entire complex healthcare ecosystem, particularly the liquid biopsy space, and also get to know the various actors that influence the diagnostic test purchasing process,” the CEO of this spin-off notes.

In addition, the team faced many defeats before arriving at their current early stages. One of these is related to the pandemic and the limitations it imposed on access to laboratories and waiting times for inputs, which delayed the technology validation trials.

“UC and the Office of Transfer and Development, have played a fundamental role in relation to the protection of intellectual

property. They also supported us in the application to calls for proposals, networking and consultancies,” the Ilico Genetics representative states.

In January 2023, along with the support from Ben Franklin Technology Partners (BFTP) fund and Angel investors, the team will move to its new laboratory in Pennsylvania (USA), within the BFTP Ventures incubator, where the prototype of a non-invasive test for the early detection of gastric cancer and its premalignant lesions will be tested.

This is a multicenter clinical study that seeks to strengthen the value proposition and boost its arrival in the global market during the first half of 2024.

LIQUID BIOPSY

A liquid biopsy is a test that is made with a blood sample in order to search for cancerous tumor cells, or DNA pieces coming from tumor cells, which circulate in the bloodstream. It can be used to help detect cancer at an early stage. It can also be used for planning a treatment, determining its efficiency and finding out if the cancer has returned. The ability to take multiple blood samples over time also helps doctors to understand the kind of molecular changes that are happening inside the tumor.

The academic Alejandro Corvalán and María José Maturana.

FERNANDO ALARCÓN / Co-founder and CEO of the company, is in the United States raising investment.

AUTONOMY AND SAFETY FOR SENIORS

More and more people are maintaining their independence in spite of their age. To support their safety in the event of accidents, a device was created to alert their families of emergencies.

GCare is a technological social innovation that allows early detection of emergency situations of seniors. Through a smartwatch-type device, in the event of an accident or risk situation families or caretakers are notified in real time through a mobile application.

“We have understood that the accident rate is recurring in the adult population. That is why it is essential for us to be a support for families and to make available a user-friendly technology that solves the problem of response time in the case of an event,” Moisés Venegas, founder and CEO of this innovative enterprise, explains.

Four years ago, the team behind this idea was awarded different competitive funds: Corfo’s SAFS Social (managed by Desafío Levantemos Chile) and AFP Habitat’s Piensa en Grandes with Hogar de Cristo (managed by Vinson Consulting).

ARRIVING IN THE UNITED STATES

In spite of the multiple difficulties they have faced, the GCare team has managed to maintain its existence and purpose. Among its plans is to continue operating nationally, along with scaling up in South America. Also, they are exploring opportunities in the United States, where they have had the possibility to interact with clinics and institutions that attend to seniors.

With a smartwatch-like device, GCare alerts family members and caregivers of seniors when an accident or caregiving situation occurs.

“The role of UC has been decisive. Through UC Center of Innovation we have been able to have access to their Red de Mentores, contacts, partners and participating in different instances of acceleration. This allowed us to pivot and understand the business model, along with learning better practices. They

have provided us with press opportunities and an effective communication channel between employees and our team,” Moisés says. In addition, in 2022 GCare was selected to be part of the second generation of the Discovery-A program, driven by UC Innovation Center and Invextor Venture Partners.

GCARE PLATFORM / Visualization

TRAINFES

REMOTE REHABILITATION FOR PARALYSIS

The development of rehabilitation technology gave way to the creation of a specialized center that has already helped more than three thousand patients.

The kinesiologist Luis Campos wanted to help one of his patients with spinal cord injury, but couldn’t find the adequate rehabilitation technology tools for it. By researching scientific literature, he understood that functional electrical stimulation (FES) had successful results, but was not utilized because it was difficult to apply outside of the clinical environment.

Thus began a development work that resulted in testing of a first prototype. alongside his team, Campos was able to help the patient that inspired him, getting him to stand up on his own with the help of electricity.

“In 2017, after an unsuccessful process of raising money, one of the main partners withdrew from the start-up, which was a hard blow to the momentum of the company. This opened up space for me to join as a new strategic partner, which ultimately triggered successful private capital raise in late 2019,” Matías Hosiasson, CFO of the company and UC industrial electrical engineer, explains.

Today, TrainFES gives access to rehabilitation to thousands of people that live with paralysis due to a cerebrovascular accident, spinal cord injury or cerebral palsy. Hundreds of people are already being rehabilitated in a 100% remote mode. In addition, they are present in the outpatient gyms and ICUs (for early rehabilitation, including post-covid patients) of more than 50 clinics and hospitals throughout the country.

“UC spirit of TrainFES is reflected in the development excellence of a technological

MILESTONES AND ACHIEVEMENTS

ELECTRICAL STIMULATION / TrainFES seeks the rehabilitation of people who have had mobility problems in an upper extremity.

The TrainFES Center is the rehabilitation and neurological innovation center that receives the largest number of patients per month in Chile. It has an alliance with Teletón to bring this development to their 14 institutions. Today, the TrainFES is undergoing FDA certification to expand its solutions to the U.S., where it is already working with Harvard University, University of Illinois Chicago and Emory University, among others.

solution that generates high social impact, both in Chile as well as the rest of the world,” Hosiasson adds. “UC is a cradle of technical and entrepreneurial skills. And through UC Innovation Center, it enables real opportunities to generate impact with innovative ideas from Chile to the world.”

TrainFES enables the rehabilitation of thousands of people living with paralysis due to accidents or serious injuries.

CANCER AND GENETICS: PREDICTIVE TEST FOR METASTASIS

ENVIRON 2023 / Today the team is integrated by 13 people.

Based on the analysis of tumor microenvironment, a team of researchers developed Prostamets, a test that predicts metastasis in prostate cancer. And they’re aiming for much more.

PLANS

Environ’s plans are to settle in the United States and implement its technology in Latin America by applying it to more types of cancer.

Environ is always focused on tumor microenvironment, with a solid scientific base, focusing mainly on supporting patients.

Motivated by the need to turn science into something really useful for people, Javier Cerda decided almost a decade ago that the outcomes of the research developed for his doctorate degree in biochemistry, could not remain in a laboratory. For him it was imperative to continue developing these results and transferring them to society.

In his thesis work, the young scientist discovered that in the case of prostate cancer, some genetic markers enabled detecting metastases. “Afterwards, I started my doctorate degree and we continued analyzing how these biomarkers could support the disease’s development . And it was at this point that we recognized that it could become a real tool to combat metastasis,” he explains.

Alongside his thesis advisor, doctor Viviana Montecinos, director of UC Laboratory of Tumor Biology and academic of UC Medicine, they developed Prostamets. It consists of a prognostic test of metastasis for patients who have already been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and it is based on the genetic signature of the tumor’s microenvironment. The test is an innovation born from research results in UC, and it has been patented in Chile and abroad.

Prostamets works in two stages: first, it detects the presence of eight genes in the prostate tissue (diagnostic biopsy) through PCR technology; then, the data is analyzed by an algorithm. Thus, the result informs the prognosis of metastasis simultaneous to the cancer diagnosis. This information provides patients the chance for an opportune and more efficient treatment.

The technology was developed with the support of the Fondef’s VIU University Research Valorization Contest. Subsequently, it was awarded among the 10 best in the 2015 BRAIN Chile program, through which it obtained funding to start its validation process. Later it received the 2020 Health Innovation Award, the biggest startup competition in Latin America, granted by the Tecnológico de Monterrey.

THE TUMOR MICROENVIRONMENT

In 2019, in order to transfer the technology of Prostamets to society and continue advancing in his findings , Javier Cerda partnered up with UC industrial and biochemical engineer Benjamín Prieto, and the professor Viviana Montecinos. Together, they founded Environ, a UC biotech startup focused on providing solutions related to cancer in three dimensions: diagnosis, prognosis and disease treatment. In English, Environ means “around” in Spanish.

Today they are not working only on prostate cancer, since they expanded their research towards breast cancer, with Corfo financing, and towards colon cancer. Thus, they are covering three of the 25 most aggressive cancers in the world, and which require early treatment to save lives.

“Tumor microenvironment is everything that surrounds the tumor. And what we have done in the last couple of years has been proving that the tumor microenvironment is as or even more important than the tumor itself, and that diagnosis and treatment is determined by this component,” Javier Cerda explains. “The key part was to determine that in this environment there are certain genes capable of telling us whether or not the patient’s disease will progress or not,” he highlights.

A SOLID BASE

“The most important thing is to work on a very solid scientific-technological basis. When we created Environ, our first round of investments was difficult and long, but that motivated us to continue moving forward, and today we have a consolidated team,” Benjamín Prieto, partner of Environ, adds.

STATISTICS

THE SOURCE OF THE INNOVATION / Environ is born from Javier’s thesis work, together with Viviana Montecinos, an academic from the School of Medicine.

They agree that throughout this decade, UC’s support has been fundamental: the Office of Transfer and Development, UC Faculty of Medicine and UC Innovation Center, with programs such as Acelerador, Global UC and BRAIN Chile. “Without the University the road would have been very difficult,” Javier assures.

The hope is to sell the first Prostamets on a pilot basis, by the end of 2023, and for this purpose they already have an agreement with the National Cancer Institute: “We don’t want to work to develop a luxury test, but to offer technologies to which all patients have access,” they conclude.

In Chile alone, two thousand men die each year from prostate cancer. One out of every six men in the world suffers from it and in about 40% of the cases it leads to progressive bone or brain metastasis.

A DRUG TO FIGHT OBESITY

It seems like a dream, but UC researchers are developing a therapeutic agent that could treat obesity and improve muscle mass.

CO-FOUNDERS

THE

MANAGEMENT OF OBESITY

“At the present time, there is no treatment that directly deals with obesity management itself. There are many treatments that tend to reduce appetite or use physical elements such as intragastric balloons or surgery, but it is insufficient for the management of a serious problem,” doctor Fardella explains.

From left to right: Pablo González, Carlos Fardella and Cristián Carvajal.

Estimatedly, there are 650 million obese people in the world, i.e., with body fat levels so high that they increase the risk of other health problems. This figure could increase if overweight people are also taken into account.

The obese population can have what is known as metabolic syndrome, which is nothing more than the excess of weight with its most related diseases: hypertension, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes, in addition to the mobility problems these patients suffer.

Approximately 14 years ago, a group of researchers led by endocrinologist Carlos Fardella, started working on the development of a drug to treat this syndrome, in a project born under the auspices of Consorcio Tecnológico en Biomedicina Clínica Molecular (BMRC), in alliance with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Corfo. This was a proposal that in its first stages was indirectly supported by the FONDEF and FONDECYT programs. So far, studies in preclinical models have shown that the drug enables a 20% weight reduction, reduces body fat by more than a third and produces a 20% drop in glycemia.

“In addition, it has the advantage that whilst decreasing fat, it improves muscle mass. And this is the magic bullet one looks for when engaging in this type of research,” explains doctor Fardella. He currently is the director of Centro Traslacional de Endicronología of Universidad Católica.

Tests have also shown that this pharmaceutical agent does not generate adverse

So far, studies in preclinical models have shown that the therapeutic agents developed by Thani Biotechnologies enable a 20% weight reduction, reduce body fat by more than a third and produce a 20% drop in glycemia.

effects in animal models, which encourages expectations about its potential transfer to the market in the medium term.

The drug is based on a cortisol synthesis inhibitor, located at abdominal fat level, called BD-40. It is a chemical compound that specifically and selectively blocks the enzyme involved in converting cortisone into cortisol.

“Cortisol increases abdominal fat, therefore, our initial idea was to reduce the local production of intra-abdominal cortisol. This is complicated, because cortisol is produced in the adrenal gland, and it is important for the normal physiology of the human being. Nobody can live without the adrenal gland and even less without cortisol. So, we had to be super specific in generating a drug that inhibited cortisol production only in the abdominal region,” the doctor explains.

CASUAL ORIGIN

This research arose in a casual manner. Working on endocrine hypertension, Carlos Fardella and Doctor Cristian Carvajal, associate professor at UC School of Medicine, focused on the main steroid metabolic indicators in obese individuals, which refocused their work in this area.

LESSONS

“On a personal level, these have been years of tremendous sacrifice and a lot of learning. When we started working on the spin-off, we didn’t have experience in the platforms to raise money, contacting investors, how to do legal paperwork, etc. There were many doubts, but now we can help others with this. As far as the University is concerned, a good proposal would be to provide protected time for their professors to develop applied research and, at the same time, attend to their other responsibilities,” Carlos Fardella, director of Centro Traslacional de Endocrinología of Universidad Católica reflects.

Five years ago, Dr. Pablo González, PhD in Chemistry and Pharmacy from UC, joined the team and has supported the development of the biopharmaceutics and formulation for human use of the BD-40 compound.

The last phase in which the project is currently underway, has the aim of generating a product for human use, for which the three researchers, together with Juan Esteban Montero and Hernán González, created Thani Biotechnologies, a UC spin-off company that will develop the drug under Food And Drug Administration (FDA), from the United States’ standards. The idea, after raising resources and for which there are already interested investors, is to move towards the design of a pre-IND (pre-investigational New Drug Application) dossier.

“The amount of money needed to advance in future clinical stages is enormous, we plan to reach that stage and then hand over most of our stakes to a large pharmaceutical company that can continue to develop the product,” doctor Fardella explains.

The drug will benefit not only people who already suffer from the metabolic syndrome associated with obesity, but also individuals who take care of their health in order not to gain weight.

“It seems like a dream, but if it came true, it would be spectacular for us. Contributing this drug to society would make us very happy and would position applied research in Chile on a high level,” the academic concludes.

CREATING SKIN IN HUMANS THROUGH PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Research by Professor Tomás Egaña hat hit the key point for many treatments of diseases linked to tissue oxygenation: the development of photosynthetic biomaterials such as sutures, bandages and artificial skin. That is how Symbiox was born.

INTERDISCIPLINARY FOCUS / Tomás is an academic of UC Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering.

Tomás Egaña is an academic of UC Institute of Biological and Medical Engineering. For several years, his research was dedicated to the development of biomaterials with proangiogenic capabilities, i.e., that induce the formation of blood vessels. Its goal was to improve tissue oxygenation.

“One day it occurred to me that perhaps we could use some cell that would produce oxygen directly in the materials. So we sowed

photosynthetic cells (microalgae in this case), we turned on the light and voilá! We verified that biomaterials produced their own oxygen, becoming the first photosynthetic biomaterials,” Tomás explains.

What purpose does creating these biomaterials have? The researcher answers as follows: “The goal is for humans to be able to photosynthesize just like plants do. That is to say, that in the presence of light we

can produce our own oxygen. If this proves to be true, it could have a tremendous impact on the treatment of many pathologies where the problem is that tissues are not well oxygenated.”

The project turned into what Symbiox is today, an enterprise that, to this date, has developed different photosynthetic biomaterials such as, for example, stitches, bandages and artificial skin. The latter has already been tested in humans and the results are positive: it is safe and induces wound skin regeneration. It also presented photosynthetic perfusion solutions, which seek to be used to preserve organs for transplants. “In this case, the purpose is for blood to produce its own oxygen. This technology could also be used to develop new blood substitutes in treatments of many conditions, for instance, hemorrhages,” he details.

For Symbiox, UC has been important in articulating different actors, as well as the support in resolving different difficulties. The latter are mainly related to raising funds for research, obtaining permissions from animal ethics committees to conduct the experiments, forming an interdisciplinary team to implement projects and to reconcile these research activities with other academic obligations.

In the short term, Egaña and his team hope to prove on patients with tissue regeneration problems, the effectiveness of different photosynthetic biomaterials, , as well as the photosynthetic perfusion solution in a porcine model of organ transplantation.

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY’S EXPERIMENT

At a TEDx PUC talk in Chile, Tomás Egaña explained that the Symbiox project is related to a very famous XVIII century experiment by Joseph Priestly. This English scientist was fascinated by the gasses that made up the air, and he strived to know its chemistry. Priestly made a series of experiments in which he used a lit candle, a plant and a mouse in an enclosed space. The story goes that he put the lit candle inside a bell until the candle went out. He deduced that the candle had expended a combustible gas, and that the remaining gas no longer had the capacity to support the flame. He repeated the test with more elements: he put a new candle and introduced a mouse inside the bell. After a quarter of an hour, the mouse was no longer alive: it needed the same air component to breathe, as the candle needed for it to burn. In the third part of the experiment, he additionally introduced a small plant inside the bell. The mouse lived and the candle burned until consumed. At that moment, Priestly made a test that related the two most important equations of biology: photosynthesis and breathing.

PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN HUMANS / The technology seeks to oxygenate damaged tissue through the generation of plant-animal hybrid systems.

INNOVATIVE PENIS IMPLANT

A multidisciplinary group led by UC academics, is working on solving severe erectile dysfunction. Replace 360, the biotechnology company that is developing this innovation, was selected in 2022 by the Startup Ciencia program to continue moving forward with this technology.

WHERE IS IT INSTALLED?

“The prosthesis replaces the corpus carvernosum of the penis, the pump is located in the scrotum and is activated by a simple touch,” explains Alberto González, designer, specialist in Science-Technology-Society (STS), Industrial Design and Innovation.

PENIS IMPLANTS / CODI seeks to help more men overcome erectile dysfunction.

By the year 2025, approximately 322 million men in the world will suffer from severe erectile dysfunction and as the population ages it will become more recurrent. This problem significantly affects a patient as well as his partner’s quality of life and it is related to severe anxiety disorders, depression and frustration. It is estimated that in Chile alone there are 77,000 men with severe erectile dysfunction that are potential candidates for penis implants. However, only 125 men per year have access to one, which represents a gap between potential and actual demand of 99.87%. This is a reality in practically all countries.

One of the causes of erectile dysfunction is associated with type 2 diabetes, arterial hypertension, smoking, prostate cancer surgery, heart and blood vessel disease. In the case of severe erectile dysfunction, these are cases that no longer respond to medication (for example Viagra™).

Motivated by this “silent problem” (as its real dimension is unknown), a team led by UC academics –Marcelo Marconi, of Medicine, together with Alberto González and Iván Caro, of the School of Design– started to work on an innovative solution. His team has been joined over the years by PhD engineers Carolina Guerra, Mauricio Campillo, Barbara de Oliveira and Xavi García, designer Sebastián Duarte and surgeon Santiago Escobar.

Thus, since 2017 they have carried out persistent work that became CODI, a device that is implanted and that doctor Marcelo Marconi –professor, urologist and one of the few specialists who perform penile implant surgery in our country– defines as a new experience. “Created to meet the needs of the patient, but also those of his or her partner,” he adds.

CODI consists of two main pieces; it is hydraulic, of easy activation and use. So far, tests have shown that it provides greater naturalness in its use and interaction, more satisfaction and comfort at rest. It was also designed to give more security in the process of implantation and a faster recovery.

MAKE THE DIFFERENCE

The current surgical experience to implant a device for erectile dysfunction is complex and, in addition, has a high cost for the patient.

“Penis implants have been on the market for 50 years without major changes, and they present a series of inconveniences. When we started working I knocked on the door of Alberto González’s office with a suitcase full of problems. He opened it and realized that these were all opportunities,” Marcelo Marconi says.

What doctors, designers and engineers did was to transform the whole experience. “We hope to have a social impact, focused on being able to positively change men’s quality of life who truly suffer together with their partner,” Alberto González explains.

What stage are they on? By 2023 they hope to make the first pilot clinical study in Chile. The device is already in level TRL 6, i.e. prototype validated in a simulated environment defined by NASA. TRL stands for Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs).

The always elusive funding has been obtained from different sources, such as UC Vice Presidency for Research, the FONDEF program and Startup Ciencia of ANID, Corfo’s HubTec program and private sources.

Universidad Católica, through the Office of Transfer and Development, has also contributed funds to cover the costs of patents

DESIGNERS AND DOCTORS

LEARNING NECESSARY LESSONS

The academics Marconi and González state: “We are very grateful for everything that Universidad Católica has done for this project, but we learned that to innovate in Chile also requires going through so many administrative barriers that, a lot of times, you want to give up . This is why being perseverant and having conviction when embarking on an idea like this is the most important thing”.

associated with the technology. However, the team continues searching for partners and/or investors.

“Our market is the world. There is a gigantic universe for growth, because the reasons behind the gap between actual demand and potential demand are multiple: usability problems, lack of knowledge, costs, there are thousands of factors,” Alberto González adds.

The founders of CODI are Alberto González, Marcelo Marconi and Iván Caro.

ACCURATE DIAGNOSTICS TO AVOID UNNECESSARY SURGERIES

ThyroidPrint® is the product of a UC spin-off company, led by the doctor and academic Hernán González, whose mission is to give high precision medicine to patients with thyroid nodules of undetermined cytology.

In 2007, as part of the BMRC-Chile Biomedicine Consortium team –a public-private alliance involving Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Abbot– , doctor Hernán González attended with other researchers an innovation and entrepreneurship immersion program for a month in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, in the United States.

There he presented his test to detect thyroid cancer in patients whose tests were “undetermined.” He was full of dreams, but in the Hollywood of start-ups he had his first forceful landing in the field of innovation: experts decreed that, at that time, the only thing he had, was a good idea.

“At that timeIn Chile the support that we have today for innovation did not exist, UC Office of Transfer and Development also hadn’t been created. I had a hard time, I realized that I knew about medicine, but nothing about entrepreneurship,” doctor González says about the experience.

“They were hard on me, but at the same time I had an extraordinary mentorship, where I learned a little bit about the ABC of innovation and met people that to this day still support me. Now, we have a product that meets

all the necessary criteria to be marketable on a worldwide basis,” he highlights.

A NECESSARY RESPONSE

ThyroidPrint® is the diagnostic test that Hernán González, specialist in thyroid cancer and academic of the Department of Oncological and Maxillofacial Surgery of UC School of Medicine, has been developing for more than 15 years to provide an answer to those patients whose thyroid cancer screening test results are indeterminate.

“The diagnostic process to determine whether a thyroid nodule is benign or malignant requires a puncture, obtaining a sample and analyzing it under a microscope, and it has a definitive answer only in 80% of the cases. The remaining 20% are reported as undetermined; and of that group, 25 percent may indeed have cancer, leading to recommending surgery. This is why we required a test that would enable identifying the benign cases and avoid unnecessary surgery,” the doctor explains.

In these indeterminate cases the researcher utilizes a technology that resolves this uncertainty by predicting with 95% certainty

HOW IS IT DONE?

To access ThyroidPrint®, the patient should contact through the company’s website (thryoidprint.com) and schedule his or her sample collection. “We do the analysis and then we send the result to the patient and doctor,” Hernán González, founder of GeneproDX, explains.

whether the nodule is benign or not. This is based on the measurement of multiple molecular markers by PCR, followed by the analysis of an algorithm developed by neural networks.

“This allows a person who had a 25 percent risk of cancer, to reduce it to less than 5 percent and, therefore, to not undergo surgery. Besides, looking at the biology, genetics and biological information that is behind tumors in general, it gives doctors the possibility to offer better solutions to patients with a treatment that is more in line with their real needs, thus avoiding unnecessary surgeries,” doctor González states.

Today, through GeneproDX, Doctor Hernán González, in conjunction with the multinational company Biocartis, is dedicated to bringing ThyroidPrint® into the global market, as it is approved by the FDA in the format of a kit. Today, the spin-off company of Universidad Católica is valued at over 120 million dollars.

The patent for this product has already been granted in Europe, United States, Canada,

Brazil, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia and South Africa. “The entire market that matters,” the researcher explains.

“Nowadays, when a patient undergoes a thyroid nodule puncture and an indeterminate result comes out, the doctors decide if he or she is a candidate for the test. A saved thyroid sample can be used or a new one can be taken to perform the analysis,” the specialist explains.

ThyroidPrint® has solved the diagnostic uncertainty of more than 1,000 patients with undetermined diagnosis, reducing unnecessary surgeries by 70%. It is already present in Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and Spain. “We are working with Fonasa to achieve further coverage because the cost-benefit ratio is very positive and results in enormous savings to the health system,” doctor González assures.

The test has received several acknowledgements on a national and international level. In 2019, it received the Avonni prize in the Health category, and in 2021 the Better World Project Award of the AUTM. It awards

universities’ technologies that contribute in improving on a global level people’s quality of life.

ACADEMICIAN AND ENTREPRENEUR / Hernán González is head and neck oncology surgeon, medical academic and founder of GeneproDX.

FROM CHILE TO THE WORLD / GeneproDX the multinational company Biocartis is working to make the test available to everyone.

RESPONSIBLE BIOTECHNOLOGY

Rubiscolab is a biotechnology company created in 2015, and it is dedicated to research, development and production of natural active ingredients from native species. It seeks the sustainable production of plant biomass from cell culture technology, which allows protecting native resources and producing at efficient and scalable costs, contributing to a sustainable and responsible economy.

It offers innovative, sustainable and value-added solutions, mainly for health, beauty and skincare, harnessing the power of native plants and the versatility of biotechnological platforms.

“UC played a fundamental role in my development as a scientific entrepreneur. Thanks to its various partnerships and grants, I studied in prestigious institutions around the world. Initially, it was a fundamental pillar for the solid scientific training that I acquired during my undergraduate and graduate studies (…) So far, the most important milestone of Rubiscolab is is the entry as an investment partner of COBIOSA, a Spanish company that has been manufacturing and marketing natural cosmetic ingredients for 50 years”. Felipe Aquea, PhD in UC Biological Sciences, mention in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, scientific director and founder of the company.

NUTRICIÓN INTELIGENTE

Rubiscolab is dedicated to the research, development and production of natural active ingredients from native species.

nutricioninteligente.cl

THE BENEFIT OF EATING HEALTHY

This Enterprise had its origin in its CEO personal experience, who, after a long time of medical treatments with no results, focused on food as one of the main sources of physical well-being. Nowadays, this nutrition center uses an exclusive methodology to identify harmful and beneficial foods for each person, to have a successful treatment, beyond the patients’ genetics. It provides care for weight loss, health problems and special dietary needs, among other services. Since it was founded in 2007 it has served more than 70,000 patients.

“My Biochemistry degree at UC gave me a very solid scientific and technical base to analyze the information I was discovering, as I was looking for answers to my own health problems. That is why I joined the Master’s program in Nutrition at the same University. Along the way I realized that there was a great opportunity to integrate the scientific world into nutrition. In 2007 I developed the laboratory inside the company, incorporating exams that are unique in Chile and can provide solutions to health problems that originate in food.” Andrea Chicurel, technical director.

Nutrición Inteligente uses an exclusive methodology to know the harmful and beneficial foods for each person.

EXCLUSIVE RIGHT THAT THE STATE GRANTS FOR THE PROTECTION OF AN INVENTION IN ITS TERRITORY, WHICH PROVIDES EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS THAT WILL ALLOW USING AND EXPLOITING ITS INVENTION AND PREVENT THIRD PARTIES FROM USING IT WITHOUT CONSENT.

Source: Lab to market program of UC Office of Transfer and Development

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

sustai ty na bili

RESPONSIBLE BIOTECHNOLOGY

RCONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION [ ]

PITCH OR ELEVATOR PITCH

ubiscolab is a biotechnology company created in 2015, and it is dedicated to research, development and production of natural active ingredients from native species. It seeks the sustainable production of plant biomass from cell culture technology, which allows protecting native resources and producing at efficient and scalable costs, contributing to a sustainable and responsible economy.

It offers innovative, sustainable and value-added solutions, mainly for health, beauty and skincare, harnessing the power of native plants and the versatility of biotechnological platforms.

THE WAY A BUSINESS, ENTERPRISE OR COMPANY

IDEA IS ORALLY PRESENTED FOR A POTENTIAL INVESTOR CUSTOMER OR PARTNER TO LISTEN TO. IT SHOULD BE AS SHORT AS THE DURATION OF AN ELEVATOR RIDE.

Source: Lab to market program of UC Office of Transfer and Development.

NUTRICIÓN INTELIGENTE

THE BENEFIT OF EATING HEALTHY

This Enterprise had its origin in its technical director’s personal experience, who, after a long time of medical treatments with no results, focused on food as one of the main sources of physical well-being. Nowadays, this nutrition center uses an exclusive methodology to identify harmful and beneficial foods for each person, to have a successful treatment, beyond the patients’ genetics. It provides care for weight loss, health problems and special dietary needs, among other services. Since it was founded in 2007 it has served more than 70,000 patients.

Nutrición Inteligente uses an exclusive methodology to know the harmful and beneficial foods for each person.

sustai ty na bili

SUSTAINABLE CLEANING OF SOLAR PANELS

Without workers or using water, this robot was created by a group of UC students and it cleans particulate debris in photovoltaic panels and therefore improves the solar power plants’ performance.

Camilo Contreras and Mauricio Chiong, former students of the Computer Science Department of UC School of Engineering, together with Camilo Flores, a mechanical civil engineer, are passionate about working in renewable energies and developed robots for cleaning solar plants in desert areas.

Inti-Tech has received funding from private capital, Ministry of Economy, Corfo and through initiatives such as Engie Factory and BRAIN Chile. They have also been supported by Jaime Navón, academic of UC Department of Computer Science who led

research within Dictuc’s Software Research and Development Unit, and by Francisco Pizarro, professor of UC Engineering, director of Inti-Tech.

The partners’ idea was to prevent the productivity drop of large-scale photovoltaic plants (which can reach 40%) due to the accumulation of particulate material (soiling). Thus, they sought to improve the plant’s injection capacity into the system and automating the cleaning process without operators, emissions or the use of water.

“Our robot is designed to dry clean. We had to do a series of studies to prove that the use of technology that dry cleans doesn’t damage the panels, and we already have letters of approval from eight module manufacturers worldwide,” Camilo Contreras explains.

His goal is in the short term, to generate a new round of financing that would allow them to expand to Mexico. “In 2020 we cleaned eight megawatts and, in 2021, 215 megawatts, so we are managing to enter largescale plants,” concludes UC alumnus.

ADAPTIVE INTELLIGENT DESIGN /

Inti-Tech developa robots designed to dry clean without damaging the solar panels.

MEGACLEANING

One megawatt equals one million watts. A solar panel has around 330 watts. That Inti-Tech cleaned 215 megas in 2021, means that they worked on 645,000 panels, each between one and two square meters. In 2020, they reached 24,000.

UC ALUMNI / Camilo Contreras, General Manager, and Camilo Flores, Development Manager of Inti-Tech.

BACK TO BULK SALES

Motivated to reduce the cost of basic products and lessen the environmental impact of plastic packaging, UC entrepreneurs decided to return to the old ways of grocery stores.

In 2015, José Manuel Moller had decided to move with some friends to La Granja (commune in Santiago) to take less time to arrive at UC San Joaquín Campus, where he was studying Commercial Engineering. In the distribution of tasks, he was responsible of purchasing basic products and realized that buying in smaller volumes in grocery stores was more expensive and polluting because more plastic containers were used. José Manuel called this finding “the poverty tax.”

How to fix it? Bulk sales had to be reimplemented, but there was no suitable dispenser. Moller got to work and sought to attack two problems: overpricing and pollution from unused containers. Over time, the venture began to take more shape, and he focused with greater energy on this second dilemma due to the environmental crisis.

“We were lucky that the idea took off very quickly, in the sense that it got a lot of press and won a lot of contests, such as a Corfo, UC’s Jump Chile and some other initiatives,” says Cristóbal Undurraga, part of the Algramo team.

Capital raising during the first years enabled them to make the first prototypes and face the challenges of bulk buying, which is related to the fact that people are not used to carrying their own containers and having allocated space in the store for product dispensers.

That is until, in 2018, the entrepreneurs were able to obtain the concrete support of the multinational Unilever. They started with electric tricycles with built-in dispensers, which

went to homes to deliver dishwashing liquid and detergent. “We took care of the whole marketing operation, and they gave us the product. And obviously, all the support of a giant,” says Undurraga.

This company seeks to become the world’s leading reference in circular economy. “We

RESULTS

want to create a consumer revolution, where the norm is to reutilize containers and to not throw them in the trash. Today, we already are in three continents and we hope to scale projects that we already have in 2022, so that we start entering new markets in 2023,” he concludes.

Algramo reached two thousand stores in its first two years of operation. The company quickly achieved a reuse rate of more than 80%, numbers that not even bottling companies were able to achieve with their returnable containers. These levels of impact are what allowed them to ally with Unilever, and in the last round of investment raising, they reached 9.1 million dollars.

FOUNDER OF ALGRAMO / José Manuel Moller next to a mobile refill station.

TEXTILE CIRCULAR ECONOMY

As a result of the initiative of a professional and mother, this company transforms waste material into beautiful products.

Reducing textile waste in Chile, through a model of circular economy with great social and environmental impact, is the purpose of Ecocitex, a company dedicated to the collection and recycling of this material.

The idea came from Rosario Hevia, UC engineer, founder and general manager, who was looking for a sustainable way to dispose of the textile waste she was generating in Travieso, her first venture, a children’s clothing reuse store.

“In Ecocitex, we receive donations of clothes in good condition and provide a recycling service for clothes in poor condition. Clothes in good condition are reused, sold or donat -

STRENGTHENING THE RELATIONSHIP WITH UC

“UC gave me great education, it has allowed me to be creative and look for non-traditional solutions to the problems that I’ve been finding. I’ve participated in various courses and even in the MBA presenting what we have done in Ecocitex. I would love to explore, to do more things such as a textile laboratory for example, which is far superior to what we have done so far,” Rosario Hevia says.

ed to people in vulnerable situations, and those in poor conditions are transformed into 100% recycled yarn,” explains Rosario Hevia.

They offer, both on the internet and in her store, yarn and laces, fabrics and stuffing from recycled clothing, upcycling (products made from discarded materials) and secondhand clothing.

Thus, in two and a half years of operation, the company has achieved important recognitions such as the Avonni 2021 Award in the Natural Resources category, Latin America Green Awards in 2021 and 2022, and Rosario Hevia was included in El Mercurio’s list of 100 leading women.

In addition to the environmental aspect, Ecocitex has a strong social focus and employs women in the process of reintegration or in prison. In addition, anyone who declares that they are in need, can select garments for personal use, free of charge. They also donate yarn and conduct campaigns to provide warm clothing, among other things.

Waste

from the textile

industry was the inspiration to create Ecocitex, a company that reuses, recycles, sells and donates clothing to people in vulnerable situations.

FOUNDER OF ECOCITEX / Rosario Hevia at a textile materials sorting point.

HYDROELECTRICITY PRODUCED IN THE DESERT

In the world’s most arid place, located in the north of Chile, the magic of power creation through pumped-storage hydroelectric power plants happens thanks to Valhalla, a project working towards a totally clean electricity system.

Valhalla was born in 2011 with the goal of having a 100% clean electricity system and providing safe and economical power when renewable resources, such as sun or wind, are not available. To achieve this vision, they created pumped-storage hydroelectric power plants, hydraulic systems that work with sea water and produce energy in the Atacama Desert, the most arid place in the world.

“It is a large-scale storage system and its purpose is to accumulate renewable energy during times of surplus energy, e.g., during daylight hours. In this way, energy can be delivered when the system requires it, which typically occurs at night and its demand is resolved by burning diesel fuel,” explains Juan Andrés Camus, CEO and cofounder.

Valhalla also innovates in the depth of community relations and environmental studies. Currently, it has two projects located in the Tarapacá Region: Espejo de Tarapacá (EdT), a 300 MV pumped-storage hydroelectric power station, and Cielos de Tarapacá (CdT).

“Our project has set a milestone in regard to the technical, social and environmental aspects, in a context where, unfortunately, innovation does not have the incentives to develop. This is due to the high financial barriers to enter, the time involved, and the useful life

of already constructed assets,” states Juan Andrés Camus, UC commercial engineer.

Because of this, the initiative has not been exempted e from challenges, from capital raising to interaction with regulation. “However, in view that our analysis shows that storage is key to electrical transformation and that our project is still being efficient, we will continue working on making it a reality,” Camus assures.

UC INCENTIVES

“UC has made several contributions to the development of both the project and my career. In particular, I would like to highlight the solid analytical development with which we were trained, and which has allowed me to evaluate different situations and contexts, from the pragmatism of finance, industrial organization, and the optics of economic and emotional incentives,” the CEO of Valhalla reflects.

PUMPING STATION / Seawater is pumped and in height is available potential energy.

GREEN GLASS

GARBAGE TURNED INTO GLASSES

A first-year university project turned into the life of its founder and is a key brand when it comes to talks about sustainable entrepreneurships.

It was the year 2009. Óscar Muñoz had entered university and in one of his classes he proposed, as a great project idea for the group, to cut bottles and make glasses. He failed: “They told me no, that they would look super ugly, and that nobody would buy them, and they kicked me out of the group and the teacher failed me.” But, on the last day of classes, a friend believed in the project and incorporated him in his team, and they started pulling bottles out of the garbage. “In the end, we passed with the same teacher with an A.”

That is how his business idea Green Glass was born and Óscar decided to make glasses as his main livelihood and personal cause. A dream that made him think that one day he would do well, that he would be able to help his family, work with recyclers and build a team.

The first six years were austere. He managed to sell very little. “In the year 2017 we launched a product listening to what people were looking for: piscola (a drink consisting of coca cola and pisco mixed together) glasses. And they started to sell, to sell and to sell. Today, we manufacture about 50,000 glasses per month, we’re a team of 60 people,” he explains.

Over the last few years, Green Glass has been professionalizing, formalizing its accounting, administration and processes. The goal continues to be to manufacture glasses in the most sustainable way possible, by taking waste bottles to create a story for them through illustrations.

They also support reforestation projects, work with stray animals, support children with

GREEN GLASS FOUNDERS /

Óscar Muñoz in the workshop next to already cut bottles awaiting design.

cancer or visually impaired people. “Green Glass is about being an activist for causes worth knowing about and supporting financially,” its founder details.

The link of Oscar with UC is through the Jump Chile program, promoted by UC Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center, which he won in 2014. With these funds, he and his team invented a machine to set fire to glasses to improve their finish. This instance

also allowed him to get to know Mentores por Chile, where he met people that had already built companies and who passed on their knowledge.

In the future, he plans to double its productivity, always with a seal of care for the planet. To this end, they are implementing solar panels, water and waste recycling with the objective of being the company with the least ecological impact and the greatest positive impact.

B CORPORATION OF CHILEAN BOTTLES

Green Glass is a B corp and part of the World Fair Trade Organization. Its production line is 100% Chilean. In the country, more than 10 million bottles are manufactured per day and at least 1.4 million bottles of glass are thrown away. The company sources from cartoneros (people who work in collecting and reselling cardboard, bottles, among other things) and grassroots recyclers, who recover bottles directly from the garbage and from the streets. They also work with recycling centers, industrial waste from vineyards, hotels and restaurants.

TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS FOR IMPROVED ENERGY MANAGEMENT

Two UC professors gave life to this technological entrepreneurship, which seeks to improve the operation and management of electricity consumption.

Vinken is a business unit of Dictuc S.A. associated to UC School of Engineering, which develops specialized consulting services, advanced research and technological developments for the energy industry, with an emphasis on the development of technologies, products and services for energy management.

demic Álvaro Lorca. They started in 2018 conducting important analysis and specialized consulting studies for the electricity industry with funding from Fondef and Hubtec, around the concept of flexible electricity consumption management.

PROFESSORS AND STUDENTS / Engineer academics

Matías Negrete y Álvaro Lorca, together with students and collaborators.

Matías Negrete, academic of UC School of Engineering and researcher of Instituto Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería (ISCI), co-founded Vinken together with the aca -

“Based on these projects, we were able to glimpse aspects in which a certain level of sophistication of new tools could lead to considerable advantages for various industry players. Particularly, we noticed a great opportunity in exploiting the synergy emerging from advanced knowledge about electricity markets, power system regulation and operation, modern mathematical-computational and data analysis methods, and certain elements of the software industry,” they say.

Today, Vinken is starting its path to become a spin-off of UC. They already have projects with public and private entities, in a context in which the electricity market is increasingly complex due to new energies with different characteristics and new business models.

VINKEN SERVICES

Through their Vink service, Vinken provides a personalized solution that increases productivity, saves on energy costs and reduces the carbon footprint associated with electricity use. This is achieved through a platform of hardware, software and mathematical models that allows the intelligent management of electricity consumption.

FLEXIBLE ELECTRICAL CONSUMPTION / Vinken seeks to improve management and coordination of flexible electrical consumption.

GOODBYE TO THE CONCEPT OF “TRASH”

This B corp offers solutions of circular economy to reduce waste before they generate an impact in the environment.

TriCiclos is dedicated to designing and implementing solutions to eliminate the concept of trash through engineering for a circular economy. Its goal is to reduce the problem of waste before it is generated, or ensures that they have the most circular destination possible, i.e. reuse, rewind and recycling.

“We have the conviction that trash is a design flaw that has to be corrected in the same moment,” states with conviction Rodolfo Poblete, CEO of TriCiclos, a company created in 2009 by Gonzalo Muñoz Abogabir –founder of the Sistema B in Latin America–and Joaquín Arnolds Reyes, later joined by Manuel Díaz.

Their services cover areas of strategic consulting, education and raising awareness, recycling and data collection. Among these areas, their most visible action has been the implementation of clean points, of which there are approximately thirty in Chile alone.

With a B Corp certification since 2011, TriCiclos is present in Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia and Brazil. To date, it has recycled more than 46,300 tons of waste and has received more than 6.8 million visits at the clean point networks it operates.

“We contribute in reducing carbon footprint and, at the same time, we work to change the materiality of thousands of containers and incorporate sustainability criteria in several industries,” Rodolfo Poblete highlights.

ACADEMIC PRESENCE

“Many people on our team studied in Universidad Católica, which was also one of TriCiclos first clients, with a clean point in Campus San Joaquín. In addition, we have always been invited to participate in various courses at engineering and design schools to bring this topic to the classroom,” the CEO of TriCiclos remembers.

FOUNDERS OF TRICICLOS / Gonzalo Muñoz (UC agronomist) and Joaquín Arnolds (UC commercial engineer).

BIO-RINGS TO SAVE THE MARINE FAUNA

Driven by the horror of marine animals’ death because of plastic, UC students created bio-rings for beverage packs made from brewing industry waste.

In 2019, a group of engineering students of Universidad Católica presented packs of beverage cans free from plastic rings: “bio-rings” or fasteners, made from organic and biodegradable materials manufactured from barley coming from the brewing industry.

That is how B-cycle was born, a clear example of circular economy, where the concept of trash is redefined by using the waste of the same industry to produce a product. Its goal is “substituting single-use plastics and mitigating the consequences they generated

in the different ecosystems we cohabit as species,” explains Carlos Hinojosa-Apud, co-founder and CEO.

The idea originated from the horrible images of entangled or dead marine animals in the ocean, because of the plastic that human beings use. It was awarded by the “UC Engineering Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship” contest, supported by Corfo’s Engineering 2030 program. Today, they work with brands that make up the multinational ABInBev, and have managed to reduce plastic by almost 76%.

From then on, B-cycle, in which professionals from the Faculty of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences of Universidad de Chile also belong to the team, has had a successful development with more awards and financial support, such as the Silver Category Award of Jump Chile 2019. Janus Leonhardt, co-founder and CCO, explains that they already have a trade agreement with ABinBev brewery, the largest in the world. “Not only to enter the Chilean market, but also to consolidate our position in the Argentinean and Brazilian markets, providing ecological solutions for everybody” the CEO adds.

UC, A FUNDAMENTAL PILLAR

“The first difficulty is to raise capital to start, but we have been able to solve this in a very good way, thanks to the support of UC Innovation Center. We are very grateful to the University, which through the School of Engineering, has been a fundamental pillar for this project. They have given us a lot, supporting us also in other instances that allow us to achieve the impact that we are looking for, both on the environment and ourselves as a society,” explain Janus Leonhardt and Carlos Hinojosa-Apud, project managers.

CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN THE BREWING INDUSTRY /

Packaging made from a biodegradable biomaterial, based on barley pomace.

THE VALUE OF ADVERTISING WASTE

This venture of professor Felipe Zegers works towards giving new life to gigantographies for street advertising.

What to do with the PVC of huge signs that are no longer used and end up in the trash? This is what Felipe Zegers, civil engineer of Universidad Católica, asked himself in 2011, and which led him to undertake and make Marketgreen.

This is how this company was born, dedicating itself to managing graphic advertising industry waste, taking care of its tracking, location and reusing through technology and QR codes.

“I realized that there was a match between this material and construction work, where I operated,” Felipe explains, who is also professor at the School of Civil Construction of Universidad Católica.

Marketgreen takes the fabric of advertisements’ PVC , turns them into rolls and delivers them to be used in construction, as well as in different industries that use it for diverse purposes: from tarpaulins to protect material, to retail bags.

Certified as a B Corp, to date it has retrieved more than 200 tons of PVC, received various awards in the sustainable industry and is number 17 in the Latin American Green Awards ranking. It was also elected “Best Climate Initiative”, by Pulso, La Tercera and Hub-sustentabilidad 2018.

EDUCATION AND CHALLENGE

“My training in the School of Civil Engineering of Universidad Católica has given me a vision beyond studying, challenging me to get out of my comfort zone and start imagining new work,” Felipe Zegers says. “With other alumni of the University, we built in Marketgreen an innovation team that allowed us to gain funding from Corfo and give our idea more value.”

RECYCLED PRODUCT / Cosmetic bag with visor, made with PVC graphic waste from advertising campaigns.

OPTIMIZING RENEWABLE ENERGIES

Knowing how much energy solar and wind power plants are going to generate, and when to clean photovoltaic panels, is the task of Suncast, a start-up born from UC engineer Constanza Levicán.

Suncast is a Chilean company that applies artificial intelligence to renewable energies. Currently, it offers two services to the solar and wind energy industry: Energy Prediction and Soiling Prediction of Photovoltaic Panels.

The first service, with their own high-precision models, predicts how much energy solar and wind power plants are going to generate in the upcoming hours and days to comply with Chilean regulations. The second service predicts when and how many times the photovoltaic panels should be cleaned to optimize costs and automate operation and maintenance processes.

Its founder is Constanza Levicán, civil electrical engineer, master in UC Engineering Sciences, and professor at the University. In 2017, she was an undergraduate student when she chose the path of technological innovation focused on the planet’s greatest challenges.

“I took my first entrepreneurial steps together with a group of students of UC Civil Engineering. We developed an early warning forest fire system using NASA satellite imagery. Afterwards I decided to focus on creating technologies to accelerate the growth of renewable energies and a more sustainable future.”

Today, Suncast has recognized clients in the energy sector, such as EDF Renewables and Atlas Renewable Energy, consolidating its services with more than 1.3 GW between photovoltaic and wind power plants in Chile.

It is a two-time winner of the Avonni 2021 National Innovation Award in both Energy and

PEDRO CORREA (CTO) AND CONSTANZA LEVICÁN (CEO AND FOUNDER) / Chilean company that applies artificial intelligence to renewable energies.

A MODEL OF PRECISION

“UC spirit and passion for excellence, is reflected in the central values of the company, as for instance precision. It is important for us to achieve the highest precision in our predictive models, we achieve the highest performance thanks to the excellent work in the revision of each step of the process,” Constanza Levicán explains.

Innovative Woman categories. And in June of 2022, Forbes magazine included Suncast in its TOP 100 of the most important start-ups of Chile.

Suncast is in the process of scaling up and has already carried out international missions,

such as ProChile Clean Energy Expo Dubai 2020, COP26 Glasgow and COP27 Egypt, and Startup Thropée Paris. “The goal is to enter the European market after finishing our consolidation in Chile,” Constanza Levicán comments.

WIRELESS SENSORS FOR THE INTERNET OF THINGS

Remote monitoring of resources is a problem with ample opportunities. This enterprise has dedicated itself to two possible applications: hydrometeorology and recycling.

REDEFINING THE FIELD /

PARTICIPATION IN CIGIDEN

Even though professor Christian Oberli recently decided to refocus his enterprise Redefine on monitoring recycling garbage cans, his research continues to be linked to the development of Wireless sensor networks, where applications in flow forecasting for hydroelectric generation and natural risk monitoring stand out. His contribution is relevant in the research line “Threats due to surface water processes” of Centro de Investigación para la Gestión Integrada del Riesgo de Desastres (Cigiden), a Fondap project integrated since its inception, in 2011, by four Chilean universities: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Universidad Andrés Bello and Universidad Católica del Norte.

Christian Oberli at Latina UC Micro station in Quebrada de Ramón.

Christian Oberli had been an academic at UC Department of Electrical Engineering for some time, working on Wifi and the emerging fourth generation of mobile telephony. However, from this southern part of the world it is difficult to contribute in these areas. In 2009 he found a potential space to do wireless monitoring of remote resources through autonomous sensors.

His first application was remote monitoring of hydrological variables in mountain range, measuring how much precipitation corresponded to snowfall and how much fell as rain and runoff, generating a risk of flooding.

With this application he created a model to know risks (of alluvium, for example), relevant for hydroelectric generation and agricultural irrigation.

And that is how, together with his team he developed Redefine: from two Fondef and a Technology Contract from Corfo, to apply the technology under Dictuc’s S.A. wings.

“Between 2015 and 2019 our goal was to develop a technology for hydrometeorological monitoring, snowmelt and landslide forecasting. We developed for alluvions an early warning system, although unfortunately Chile –on a State level– is not prepared to incorporate more sophisticated ways of working with these natural risks. We were in a project with Enel for snowmelt forecasts for hydroelectric generation, with which we even went to Italy. Now we are working with irrigators of Maule, Longaví and Lontué, who partnered to consume data from the stations that we produce and sell,” the professor explains.

In 2019, Christian Oberli decided again to take a turn so that his enterprise could grow more, even though he had already managed to turn it into a spin-off.

“We focused on the use of technology for recycling. We are progressing on a new Corfo project which has allowed us to sensor clean points and glass containers on public roads.

The purpose is to know exactly how full it is in order to optimally program the removal of waste.

In spite of applied innovation, Redefine has faced many difficulties. “Entrepreneurship is much more difficult than publishing research,” Oberli acknowledges. And he argues that the great “disability” in Chile is that there is no industrial culture for technological development.

“Countries developing electronics have a whole ecosystem for it, it takes them less than a week to pass from design to prototyping. Here, it costs twice as much and it takes two months,” he complains.

Nevertheless, in this adverse context the School of Engineering provided a protected space for Redefine’s resource procurement through contests, and UC Office of Transfer and Development facilitated the licensing of the results.

“I am particularly grateful for the space given to academics to make R&D in the School of Engineering,” he says.

Redefine’s first application was the remote monitoring of hydrological variables in the mountain range, measuring how much precipitation corresponded to snowfall and how much fell as rain and runoff, generating a flood risk.

CHRISTIAN OBERLI / Academic of UC Department of Electrical Engineering, expert in wireless communications.

100% DIGITAL INDUSTRIAL WASTE MANAGEMENT

This platform brings together all actors involved in the process of industrial waste management, promoting environmental care and circular economy.

Recylink was born in 2017 with the goal to deliver solutions in industrial waste management, after its founders realized that it is a complex process involving many different actors that need to be connected to each other in order for it to work better.

With this concern in mind, they developed a platform of sustainable waste management for industries, retail, mining, agribusiness, healthcare, education, logistics, factories and construction, which communicates to everyone involved in a digital ecosystem of

SUPPORT FROM UC INCUBA

“In 2017, when we first started working on our idea and were still unnamed, we were selected in the Corfo seed fund. Since this was the first funding we won, we did not know how it worked and we were right on schedule to comply with all the documentation and process. At that time, we were advised that we needed an incubator to back us up. That is where UC Incuba (from UC Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center) came in to support us in various general areas and also in the first steps to get everything up and running, which are the most complex ones,” Nicolás Behar says. .

companies. The process works by digitizing the operation, communicating and coordinating, controlling, managing certificates and documents, ordering expenses and simplifying waste management.

“We help companies and organizations to improve and achieve their goals in waste management, digitize and make them more sustainable, thus increasing its value. We accompany and support them to get to the next level with the help of technology,” explains Nicolás Behar, CEO and co-founder of Recylink.

The increase in remote work because of the coronavirus pandemic, drove them in the provision of their services, so that it could be performed completely remotely, which allowed them to cover all of Chile, getting to new industries and starting their first international operations. “We hope that with time they will multiply,” Nicolás highlights.

Among the start-up’s commitments is its certification as a triple-impact B Corp –economic, social and environmental– a goal that pushes them to permanently improve in the long term.

RECYLINK FOUNDER / Nicolás Behar on a pile of construction waste.

AN APP THAT SEEKS TO HAVE CLEANER CITIES

Little by little, this enterprise of Aconcagua Valley has focused on innovating in smart city topics and on growing its implementation throughout the territory.

Basurapp is a waste management platform, developed by Mapcloud, that modernizes the garbage collection system through digital transformation.

Through a free downloadable app, it notifies neighbors when the collection truck is close to home.

This tool makes it possible to keep garbage confined until final disposal. As a collaborative platform it enables citizen reports and informs or collection companies of the status of an incident by means of a photo and the phone location . For example, it can apply to problems with containers and the presence of micro dumps, among others.

This information is geolocated and received on the web platform, which generates metrics and statistics together with an internal and public messaging system.

It improves communication between citizenry, municipality and the collection company.

Hence, Basurapp modernizes the waste management model, with low barriers to entry and a supportive policy of cultural change.

In addition, it reduces costs and optimizes extraordinary collections, while bridging social gaps by being a triple impact tool.

The technology was also adapted to the collection of recyclable waste through the HoyReciclo program, promoted by Asociación de Alimentos y Bebidas A.G. (AB Chile), Asociación de Municipios por la Sustentab -

BASURAPP PRESENT /

The Basurapp team together with the former Environment Minister, Javier Naranjo, in an activity to disseminate the “Hoy Reciclo” (Today I recycle) initiative.

ilidad (AMUSA) and in support of ReSimple recycling management system.

The benefits that HoyReciclo provides to municipalities and companies are geared to a circular economy, which gives value to recyclable waste. In addition, it allows the transition towards the Responsabilidad Extendida del Productor (REP) law, a mechanism whereby priority product manufacturers are responsible for organizing and financing waste management from the marketing of their own products in the country.

THE PUSH FOR A GOOD IDEA

“Incuba UC (a program of UC Innovation Center) allowed us to obtain our first financing and to professionalize our enterprise through tools such as financial advisors, training courses, etc. Thus, we developed our spin-off and scaled on a national level, generating sales and developing our tools,” Nicholas Herbekian Lowery, sales director.

THE LEADING APPLICATION OF SUSTAINABLE BICYCLES IN THE UK

The chileans Agustín Guilisasti and Ignacio Gutiérrez are the founders of this company that offers free mobility and pedals to diminish the impact of transportation on the environment.

Just like a forest captures CO₂, in HumanForest the users use their free and 100% sustainable e-bikes to avoid emitting polluting gas. And the business model of this company, based in England, consists of providing a platform of digital publicity and sustainable micro-mobility through an app.

HumanForest was ranked eighth in the Business Cloud Transport Tech 50 2021 ranking, which includes the most innovative technology companies in transportation in the

HumanForest seeks to be the biggest operator of electric bicycles in London and has already more than 250,000 registered users.

United Kingdom. This award acknowledges the original business model of the company that seeks to be the biggest electric bicycle operator in London, and has already more than 250,000 registered users and over 1,250,000 trips. In this way, the emission of 200 tons of CO₂ has been avoided, a priority

for this start-up focused on diminishing the impact of transportation on the environment.

“UC gave us the tools to be able to defend ourselves in the labor market. In addition, we were able to meet an excellent group of people and even work on different projects,” explains Agustín Guilisasti, UC commercial Engineer, who, alongside Ignacio Gutiérrez, founded this promising company whose purpose is to “reforest” the cities through the reduction of CO₂ emissions.

MICRO-MOBILITY SPOTIFY

In Europe, HumanForest has been compared to Spotify due to its innovative business model. The app works as a digital marketing platform for companies such as Bloomberg or the Financial Times, which allows each user to be offered 10 minutes of free travel. Thus, it has become the cheapest and most accessible alternative of transportation in London. The marketing platform has proven so successful that HumanForest already has 100% of its commercial impression pool sold.

FOUNDER OF HUMANFOREST / Agustín Guilisasti on a HumanForest bicycle.

GREEN PHONES

RePhone is a start-up born in 2010 with the original name of Reutiliza, inspired by the care of the planet, to contribute to the reduction of electronic waste through the reuse of discarded phones or parts of them. It is a B-corp, which aims for an economy that can create integral value for the world. Its product is RePhone, a refurbished smartphone that is 100% functional and sustainable that saves CO2 in its reuse. Every unit includes an USB cable, it does not have a charger or headphones, and is Multiband/SAE approved for all national and international carriers. RePhone has been acknowledged as a sustainable company that contributes to the circular economy.

“The trust and values as alumni of Commercial Engineering of Universidad Católica led us to be partners. In our case, we also have a triple commitment: social impact, environmental care and economy. These years we have had the support in financial terms of other alumni, through companies they work and participate at, and one of us has been an entrepreneurial teacher of ING2030 for seven years, which has enabled us to maintain close contact with the university and its new generations of students. The big milestone of our company was to rethink the business in a new stage according to the market, with analysis, strategy and mentoring support.” Felipe Broitman, UC commercial engineer and CEO of RePhone Chile; Cristóbal Valdés, director and co-founder.

RePhone is a refurbished Smartphone that saves CO₂ in its reuse.

STRATEGIC PLANNING

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECTS FOR A COMPANY TO BE SUCCESSFUL. IT ENABLES THEM TO SET SHORT-, MEDIUM-, AND LONG-TERM OBJECTIVES AND THUS EXECUTE THE BUSINESS MODEL. IT ESTABLISHES THE FINANCIAL, LEGAL, ADMINISTRATIVE AND STRATEGIC PLAN TO ACHIEVE THESE OBJECTIVES.

Source: Lab to market program of UC Office of Transfer and Development.

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

[

biotech nolo gy

CONCEPTOSPARAENTENDERLA INNOVACIÓN

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION]

MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT/SERVICE

A PROTOTYPE OF THE PRODUCT/SERVICE TO BE MARKETED. IT IS DEVELOPED IN ITS MOST BASIC FEATURES AND AT MINIMUM COST TO EVALUATE THE INTEREST IT GENERATES IN USERS AND/OR CLIENTS, THUS MAXIMIZING LEARNING ABOUT THE MAIN RISKS OR UNCERTAINTIES OF THE BUSINESS. IT IS KNOWN AS MVP, OR MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT.

Source: Lab to market program of UC Office of Transfer and Development.

biotech nolo gy

THE MAGIC OF PRODUCING ANIMAL MEAT WITHOUT KILLING ANIMALS

One academic and one UC alumni joined their passions to help change the food industry: using precision fermentation to grow animal meat from cells. They were joined by two young bioengineers, graduate alumni of the academy who have taken on the role of key executives in the company.

UC IN THE COMPANY

Currently, Dictuc S.A. has a 20% ownership interest in Sticta. But for Eduardo Agosín, the most important thing is the trust UC has had in them. For this reason, he hopes that his company can be a contribution to the University. “We hope that this will be a virtuous relationship. We want to build the first industrial biotechnology plant in Chile. A plant for food ingredients produced through precision fermentation and this enables our undergraduate and graduate students to do internships and be hired. We want to be a link and place with open doors,” the professor of UC Engineering points out.

With this biological technology it will no longer be necessary to sacrifice animals or mistreat them to obtain protein for human consumption.

THE STICTA

TEAM /

Eduardo Agosín, together with Vicente Cataldo, Andrés Ariztía and Sebastián Mendoza.

Eduardo Agosí’s first pitch as an entrepreneur to international investors was in early November 2022. For 30 years he has been an UC Engineer academic, but now the challenge he is facing is different. The scene: the Biohunt Summit of Ganesha Lab. His goal: to obtain financing for Sticta, the start-up he has with his partner Andrés Ariztía, UC agronomist.

Sticta is a biotechnology company that works on solving the future’s food crisis. Considering the impact that the meat industry has on climate change due to its high generation of greenhouse gasses, Sticta has focused on the development of cultivated meat, a food that has recently been approved by the FDA. The methodology is untraditional: it consists of growing animal cells in bioreactors, and from there onwards, producing genuine meat. They propose that it is not necessary to sacrifice animals to obtain animal protein. Furthermore, it does not employ antibiotics, it uses 99% less soil, and 90% less water than conventional meat.

The company was born by mid-2021 as a precision fermentation company. “It is a platform of biological manufacturing that uses a yeast which produces in a sustainable and cost-efficient way a wide range of biological products, that impact on different industrial sectors. In this case, compounds that are key to producing cultured meat,” Agosín, doctor in microbial biotechnology, explains.

So far, the high price of the necessary nutrients enabling the proliferation of animal cells has been the main difficulty to enter the market.

Because of this, UC entrepreneurs have focused on designing a culture medium free of fetal bovine serum, which was up until now, an indispensable product to grow cells with which they lowered costs by 80% and, at the same time, increased cell proliferation speed by 30%.

Thus, the first product of this biotech is Smartserum, developed in conjunction with the company SuperMeat, located in Tel Aviv, Israel, pioneer in the production of cultured chicken meat. “We have prepared a set of ingredients through our technology, with which we have succeeded in obtaining in a single fermentation, a cell culture medium that is 10 times cheaper and of high quality,” Agosín points out.

CHALLENGES AND PLANS

The history of Sticta started from another Israeli transnational company Adama, which commissioned Dictuc S.A., a company connected to UC, to produce yeast plant growth regulators. To this end, it was requested of Agosín and his laboratory, to develop a solution. In four months he succeeded, substantially improving productivity and costs. This link was useful to get to know Andrés Ariztía, who at the time was the manager and partner of Adama Chile, who offered to partner with him in another venture: the low-cost production of recombinant proteins for the massive proliferation of chicken cells needed by SuperMeat.

So, as they went along, they presented an international patent of their efficient biological

manufacturing system, and they have already registered the Smartserum brand in the United States and Europe. In addition, they are close to finalizing a MoU with SuperMeat for the employment of Smartserum in an industrial plant for the production of cultured chicken meat, which will start operating in the US during the first semester of 2024.

“Afterwards, we will send our Smartserum chicken to the United States, where the SuperMeat plant will be established. At a later date we will work on the development of beef and fish Smartserum, respectively,” Agosín says enthusiastically.

Nevertheless, Agosín thinks that there is space in this area for many other companies: “We are talking about more than 300 million tons of meat that are consumed annually in the world. It’s a huge potential market,” he explains.

As for any start-up, despite the promising alliance with the Israeli company, it is extremely important to raise more capital. To this end, the goal today is to gather enough capital to invest in infrastructure and biotechnological development.

“My dream is not to have a big company, but that hopefully our technology can become the future butcher’s shop of the neighborhood, the community or the region that will massify the sustainable consumption of cultured meat. Hopefully our grandchildren will ask us: Is it true that meat used to come from an animal that was sacrificed?,” the academic concludes.

AN ANSWER TO WATER SHORTAGE

Two Chilean scientists created a biofilter to reuse greywater and contribute to sustainable resource management.

SCIENTISTS AND ENTREPRENEURS /

FACING THE DROUGHT

Thanks to the Alto Impacto program and an alliance with INDAP La Calera, Yaku is able to work with small farmers affected by the drought. On average, families recover daily between 500 and 1,000 liters of water, saving potable water consumption and increasing water availability for irrigation. In 2022, with Corfo’s Semilla Expande and thanks to the support of Hub Providencia, where they currently operate, they were able to scale production to 8,000 liters. Thanks to Un Alto en el Desierto foundation, biofilters were installed to reuse gray water from 60 families of the Coquimbo region. Finally, they were awarded Hubtec’s Grow fund, which is supporting the commercial expansion and internationalization of the technology.

Valentina Veloso and Camila Cárdenas are the inventors of this technology.

Valentina Veloso and Camila Cárdenas met in the first semester of the Doctorate program in UC Engineering. They had a lot in common: the desire to undertake and the concern about the alarming figures on water scarcity.

“One day we thought about the amount of water we waste in the shower (also in laundry and the sink) and we asked ourselves: Why do we waste this water? How is it possible that today more than half of the country suffers from a lack of water, while in the cities we continue to flush our toilets with drinking water? We did our bibliographical search and, after a brainstorming process, the idea of Yaku was born: utilizing microorganisms to filter water in a sustainable way,” they say.

Yaku is an innovative biofilter for the sustainable reuse of greywater and waste water. The biofilter contains microorganisms that naturally remove water pollutants, making it suitable for irrigation and toilet flushing, giving new life and a circular use to water. With Yaku, consumption of drinking water is reduced by 50%.

“We are proud to belong to the few national start-ups founded by Chilean female scientists. Moreover, it is one of the few where its technology was 100% created and developed in Chile, achieving results in line with international standards,” their founders state.

This venture has had the difficulties of scaling up a company’s operation, but with an additional component related to working with microorganisms. Nevertheless, their motivation to bring science and technology to society in an affordable way, has kept them working. Likewise, they have the conviction that Yaku is one of the solutions that will palliate the water crisis that we are living through.

UC has been a key collaborator in the development of this project, it allowed them to carry out the initial R&D phase and validate the technology in the laboratory. Thanks to

Yaku is an innovative biofilter for the sustainable reuse of greywater, i.e., wastewater with low sanitary risk. Its use reduces potable water consumption by 50%.

Corfo’s Semilla capital, they were able to carry out laboratory tests at the University together with Dr. Ignacio Vargas of Hydraulic Engineering, an expert in greywater. Since that year they have a collaboration agreement, share intellectual property and have the support of UC Office of Transfer and Development for the whole process of patenting the technology.

Yaku’s short term plans are scaling its operations to be able to reach more people and industries every day. To date, they have used the biofilter for household uses in urban and rural sectors, but its goal is to offer technology on a larger scale, to implement in larger projects such as schools, universities,

municipalities, commerce, industries and housing complexes.

ACHIEVEMENTS

In the year 2017, Yaku won the Aplica Tu Idea contest of the Copec-UC foundation. In 2019 they were awarded Corfo’s Capital Semilla which allowed them to develop the R&D stage. In 2020, they piloted the technology in the field and, thanks to BRAIN Chile, they searched for potential customers and packaged the first commercial version of the biofilter. In 2021, thanks to Corfo’s Crea y Valida Mujeres project, they developed a new and improved design of the biofilter.

100% CHILEAN SOLUTION / The technology recovers wastewater from sinks, showers and laundry.

TECHNOLOGY FOR CLEANER MINING

The goal of this UC alumni enterprise is clear: becoming world leader of the development of cleaner technologies for mining.

Ceibo develops and combines science, engineering and operational excellence to make mining a more sustainable industry. Its challenges are to achieve more economical and environmentally sustainable extraction, to capture particulate matter and reduce water consumption.

According to its founder, Cristóbal Undurraga, this enterprise was born with the purpose of searching in technology, ecological responses to the impact and challenges of large-scale mining in Chile and on a global level. One of these is advancing in the leaching of primary sulfides, which does not yet have standard applications on a large scale and sustainable cost.

“We want Ceibo to become a world-leading company in the development of clean tech -

nology for mining. It is an ambitious goal, but the size of the challenge demands bold, innovative and disruptive approaches,” says Undurraga, who studied Mechanical and Metallurgical Civil Engineering at our university.

During the last years, Ceibo has kept itself close to UC for its platform of technological services. The first approach was through Dictuc S.A., applying strength studies on materials and roads, and today the company has extended this relationship to expert consulting, access to electron microscopy and the use of other laboratory equipment.

Its offices are in UC Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center, an ideal place because of its infrastructure, access to academic and student talent, and the group of biotechnology companies that are located there.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES TO REDUCE THE COPPER SCARCITY

The world is facing a transition of the energy matrix to combat the effects of climate change and the copper shortage is a real and concrete problem. To reduce the gap between supply and demand of copper that will happen in the next few years, the emergence of new technologies and process innovation are urgent for a responsible energy transition. Ceibo is working on technologies to leach primary sulfides in a faster, more sustainable and economically profitable way.

Today, the company operates three contracts at the most important mining sites in Chile, to whom it provides a comprehensive road management service, irrigation plans based on real-time information and data intelligence, online reporting, and preparation and application of Ceibo dust suppressant on roads and other sources of particulate matter emissions in mining operations.

To date, they have captured 26,000 tons of dust and generated savings in the consumption of close to 1 million m3 of water. The latter equals to having avoided the use of 800 million liters of water, which is annually consumed in communes of the north of Chile, such as San Pedro de Atacama or Andacollo.

THE CEIBO TEAM IN CODELCO ANDINA, 2022 / Ceibo operates road management contracts at mining sites in Chile.

ENZYME REAGENTS FOR DRUG DETECTION

In the Los Lagos Region, a group of young scientists expert in enzyme catalysis combine their collective knowledge and their passion for research.

In addition to his many accomplishments, Manuel Rozas, the company’s founder and Chief Scientific Officer, is most notable for his biotechnology, which originates in the south of Chile, where the scientific center is getting stronger by the day and is surprising the world.

Kura Biotech was born from this UC-trained biologist’s interest to apply scientific knowledge to the treatment of aquaculture waste and generating value-added products. First, he experimented with the abalone, an introduced mollusk cultivated in the south and north of Chile, from which he obtained an enzyme for application in forensic toxicology that became the best in the world. “All of this before there were any talks about circular economy in our country,” the professional explains.

Based in Puerto Varas and the United States and born in 2013, Kura Biotech is currently world leader in the development and production of enzyme reagents for the detection of drugs, having an ample range of enzymes in its catalog: ranging from some extracted from marine industry waste, to others of artificial origin, which today are globally considered the best of their kind.

In addition, during the pandemic it was the first Chilean organization in developing Covid-19 detection PCR kits, which were backed by the Instituto de Salud Pública (ISP) and were used by more than 50 laboratories in Chile.

Present in more than 15 countries and with customers as varied as the Mayo Clinic and the FBI, its products are grouped into three

CO-FOUNDER

LIQUEN FOUNDATION

Through its Liquen Foundation, Kura Biotech has carried out 40 projects in its community and in its three verticals: Sustainability, Education and Childhood. Until now, it has invested in key support of local organizations and neighborhood initiatives. Its UC link is through training received by its founder and several members of the team, many of them students of UC scientific degrees that remained working in the company after their professional internship.

brands and areas: Avenire, genetic testing; Finden, toxicology reagents; and Blikka, multiomics reagents.

Kura Biotech is a B-corp and its commitment is summarized in five principles: unlimited spirit, human connections, doing a good job, innovative curiosity and the willingness to return the favor.

Kura

Biotech is

a B-corp world leader in the development and production of enzymatic reagents for

drug detection.

OF KURA BIOTECH / Eduardo Wallach and Manuel Rozas holding reagents developed by Kura for Covid-19 testing during the pandemic.

PRECISION BREEDING IN FRUIT TREES

This company develops sustainable fruit trees, especially cherries, for better consumption. Its founders hope to impact millions of people in the world. For example, they are developing pitless cherries and strawberries that will last longer before spoiling.

Meristem is a biotech start-up focused on precision breeding of fruit trees by gene editing, to develop sustainable fruit cultivars, explains Dr. Bernardo Pollak, CEO, biochemist trained at Universidad Católica.

The Meristem team has several doctors in disciplines related to molecular biology and vegetable sciences, and closely supports the leaders of the Chilean cherry export market to China.

In this process they have also focused on improving technological capacities for the fruit world in Chile, through a business area to improve the molecular diagnosis in plants.

Multiplex is the spin-off using advanced technologies to identify viruses and bacteria in plants, to ensure that they are healthy before importing or seeding. In addition, it develops new methods to increase diagnostic certainty, along with making them more accessible for adoption in the industry.

The most important milestone of this enterprise was to raise the largest amount of seed capital in Chile (US$5 million) and the proposal’s materialization to create new ways of developing biotechnology in the country in the agronomic area. It is currently in the R&D phase and they hope to impact millions of people.

THE VALUE OF UC EDUCATION

“My undergraduate education at UC gave me many professional development opportunities and subsequent access to the doctoral program at University of Cambridge. I always kept in contact with academic staff, which was part of my vision. But in concrete terms, my later studies were decisive in the creation of this enterprise,” Dr. Bernardo Pollak states.

THE MERISTEM TEAM IN ITS LABORATORY / María Ignacia Fuentes (CSO), Bernardo Pollak (CEO & Co-founder) and Pablo Garcés (CBO).

VALUE PROPOSITION

IT IS THE HEART OF THE BUSINESS MODEL. THE VALUE PROPOSITION OF A PROJECT OR COMPANY SUMMARIZES IN A SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE WAY THE SOLUTION OFFERED TO A SPECIFIC AUDIENCE.

Source: Lab to market program of the UC Office of Transfer and Development.

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

sys tems tech nolo & gies

PRECISION BREEDING IN FRUIT TREES CONCEPTOSPARAENTENDERLA INNOVACIÓN

MCONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

]

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

eristem is a biotech start-up focused on precision breeding of fruit trees by gene editing, to develop sustainable fruit cultivars, explains Dr. Bernardo Pollak, CEO, biochemist trained at Universidad Católica.

The Meristem team has several doctors in disciplines related to molecular biology and vegetable sciences, and closely supports the leaders of the Chilean cherry export market to China.

In this process they have also focused on improving technological capacities for the fruit world in Chile, through a business area to improve the molecular diagnosis in plants.

A COLLABORATION PROCESS ENABLING SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES TO BECOME PRODUCTS OR SERVICES THAT REACH THE MARKET AND IMPACT ON SOCIETY. ANY RESEARCH RESULT THAT IS PROTECTABLE BY ANY MECHANISM, ESSENTIALLY THROUGH INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS, MAY BE TRANSFERRED.

Source:

THE VALUE OF UC EDUCATION

THE MERISTEM TEAM IN ITS LABORATORY / María Ignacia Fuentes (CSO), Bernardo Pollak (CEO & Co-founder) and Pablo Garcés (CBO).

Cuenta 2022 of the UC Office of Transfer and Development.

sys tems tech nolo & gies

THE ROBOTS THAT CONTROLS PRICES AND STOCKS IN SUPERMARKETS

This is the story of how a professor, only with the will to solve a problem and his student’s support, developed an incredible technological solution for retail.

FOUNDING TEAM / Luis Vera, Álvaro Soto and Ariel Schilkrut are the partners behind Zippedi.

INSTITUTION AT THE FOREFRONT

“In Universidad Católica, we academics have a lot of freedom to explore different possibilities. The UC hallmark is in terms of developing a product that is at the forefront of technology and that speaks of the quality of its academics, students and the human group behind a world-class institution,” explains UC Engineering Computer Science Department academic Álvaro Soto.

Asupermarket classic: standing in a very long checkout line and seeing that the person being served has problems with the value of a product. The price they are going to charge does not match the one on the shelves. Urgent calls to the manager, red lights and an even longer queue of shoppers increasingly annoyed because the wait is getting longer.

“I found myself in that situation when I got the idea of giving a solution to this problem with the technology we were developing at University. In this case, a robot that could make a daily sweep of various operation difficulties that could arise in supermarkets,” tells Álvaro Soto, academic of the Department of Computer Science, of UC Engineering.

That is how Zippedi was born, the first Chilean robot that uses artificial intelligence and whose purpose is to verify that prices and order of exhibited products do not present any errors. It works during the night in an autonomous way, moving through supermarket aisles and other types of retail stores, performing tasks inherent to these businesses, such as checking stock, codes and prices.

The robot was created in 2017 as a product of the three-year research led by Álvaro Soto. He led a group of scientists and Computer Science graduate students at Universidad Católica. To implement it, they first received support from Corfo, Conicyt and then, when they were convinced, from different retail chains in Chile.

“Supermarket prices vary every week. Imagine that they have 20,000 products and they change 600. If they have 100 stores, they are renewing thousands of prices.

3.0 VERSION

In Las Vegas, United States, Zippedi presented a new version of its robot that utilizes the digital twin system with aesthetic changes, new sensors and screens. “It makes it much easier to assemble,” Luis Vera explains.

And it is normal that mistakes are made, because updating them is a Herculean task,” professor Soto explains.

To do its job, Zippedi automatically creates a visual map the first time it enters a store and, with this, defines a navigation plan before touring the aisles. In the event of finding difficulties in its trajectory, the robot changes its strategy. When finishing its task, the device returns autonomously to a dock to connect to the power grid.

Zippedi is characterized by its rectangular shape and flat base. Its development was based on three fundamental technologies: “Navigation technology – that the robot knows how to get autonomously to the aisle it will check; visual recognition - that it can determine the operation problems that can occur; and finally, how to activate actions in the supermarket with this information,” Álvaro Soto says.

From the robot, and together with Luis Vera and Ariel Schilkrut, the academic founded a spin-off company and has already commercialized the product to national (Cencosud and Sodimac) and international retail companies. The short-term goal is to consolidate the business in the United States, where they have already hired 200 robots in New York, New Jersey, Florida and

Zippedi is the first Chilean robot to use artificial intelligence and whose purpose is to verify that prices and order of products on display in supermarkets and retail stores do not present errors.

INTELLIGENCE

Texas. They will also seek to strengthen their brand in Colombia, where they have had reduced presence.

“OVERCOMING FRUSTRATION”

Álvaro Soto doesn’t forget that, before success, the beginnings were complicated because nobody in Chile believed that a technology could be developed at this level . “It was very frustrating for me, but my students were very enthusiastic, and the desire led us to make things happen. You have to be perseverant to overcome frustration,” the teacher reflects.

Today, Zippedi has offices in Silicon Valley. Its last stock market valuation was US$100 million, and is estimated to reach US$10 billion. Additionally, its executives have already closed deals to enter the home improvement market – and they just launched Zippvolution, which is the delivery of updated information on the status of sale points to optimize work and create a technologyequipped workforce.

WITH ARTIFICIAL

/ The robot checks prices and the order of products on shelves of commercial premises.

TRANSFORMING SCREENS INTO TOUCH SURFACES

Two UC professionals are developing a device that democratizes access to digital education, through an innovative interactive technology at a disruptive price.

A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP

“We have worked with UC in several aspects: intellectual property, with the UC Office of Transfer and Development; and UC Innovation Center through its competitions it has trained us in business modeling and commercial validation. Their Fablab has been key in the creation of prototypes to validate and the iterations we have made to our technology. We keep a close relationship with the University,” the founder of Paperlux Luciano Lizama says.

Luciano Lizana and Álvaro Donoso are two former classmates from the Liceo Nacional de Maipú who, as teenagers, never imagined that their mutual interest for innovation and their desire to improve access to education led them to reunite years later at Universidad Católica. They united through the creation of a spin-off which in its short life, is already giving a lot to talk about.

It was in the “Design Bootcamp”, of the Minor in Innovation of our university, when, as an Architecture student, Luciano learned to identify problems and think about the solutions they could have. “We started by addressing how to reduce paper consumption and to relocate its uses. That is how we thought we could extend a cell phone’s touch functions to replace many of its uses with a pen, since it is something that almost everyone always has at hand,” he explains.

While working on the development of his first functional prototypes, he realized that he needed support and that is how a friend reminded him that his former classmate Álvaro Donoso studied Civil Electrical Engineering and was also at UC. That is how they formed an alliance and created PaperLux Go, a low-cost device aimed at students that can transform any cell phone into a large 12-inch pen tablet.

They realized that a tablet or PC’s most expensive components are already in a cell phone (processors, screen, and battery). For this reason, PaperLux Go is the simplest device that allows reinterpreting the capabilities of more than 28 million cell phones in Chile, and transforms these into a powerful educational tool.

“It is an interdisciplinary work that brings together optics, programming, design and electronics. We work together with Álvaro on different aspects: he was in charge of the initial programming and electronics steps, and I was involved with the optic system, industrial design and manufacturing,” Luciano says.

THE TEAM / Álvaro Donoso and Luciano Lizana, founders of Paperlux.

EXPONENTIAL DIFFERENCES

To continue strengthening their business, Luciano and Álvaro formed PaperLux SpA, a spin-off with constant research and development of technological solutions that democratize access to digital education, offering the same capacities and experiences of the best devices on the market, and at a fraction of the cost.

So far, they have obtained the necessary resources for their development from the Jump Chile 2020 program and BRAIN Chile 2021, where they have already won twice. That is how they managed to raise funds to work on new prototypes and make different tests for its commercialization. “For us, the most difficult part on this path hasn’t been financing, but finding the right people. That is why being able to count on the coordination of UC has been super important, it has allowed us to obtain the collaboration of specialists,” Luciano Lizana highlights.

LET’S GO FOR MORE

During the development of PaperLux Go, its second innovation was born: PaperLux Touch, a device aimed at teachers that transforms any screen –television, computer or a projection on a wall– into a large interactive

touch screen, through the use of a pen. The operation is very simple and works through a sensor that connects to a USB port.

Through the Hemispheric University Consortium, which includes UC along with 13 other universities in the continent, Luciano and Álvaro were able to participate in 2022 with a stand at the eMerge Americas fair in Miami, United States, one of the most important fairs in the region.

What’s next? They already have 1,550 units of their PaperLux Touch device, specifically the 24th version, so that teachers can try them out. After this, they intend to manufacture around 400 units a month.

The goal of this company is to offer PaperLux Touch at a price that is more than 10 times lower than the technologies that exist today in the market, which until now have remained inaccessible to most people.

WINNERS

PaperLux Go was patented along with academics of the School of Design, Sebastián Negrete and Paula Wuth, after participating in the Patentar para Transferir contest of UC Office of Transfer and Development.

SAFETY IN MOTION: ANTI-SEISMIC SOLUTIONS

Two UC engineers and academics founded SIRVE, a company dedicated to developing technologies for the seismic protection of buildings and large constructions. Paradoxically, the 2010 earthquake was the main ally for the project’s consolidation.

AWARDS

SIRVE was awarded the 2010 Avonni prize in the Urbanism, Architecture and Construction category, for the seismic protection developed for the Titanium Tower; and the 2011 Endeavor prize (San Francisco, USA) was awarded for the high impact achieved in the field for anti-seismic technological development. Also, in November 2013, SIRVE’s founding partner, Carl Lüders, was honored with the AICE Oustanding Engineer Award. Diario Financiero awarded SIRVE and Juan Carlos De La Llera the Innovation Award for Best Entrepreneur and Companies in 2015; and in 2017 it received the Avonni Award for Innovative Trajectory Anacleto Angelini.

Juan Carlos De La Llera insisted time and time again. Together with Carl Lüders he had founded the company SIRVE in 2003, under UC’s wing. They were dedicated to the development of anti-seismic technology for buildings, but once they started selling their products, doors were very difficult to open.

“The answer of businessmen who we were trying to access, was that they didn’t want to be the first ones to try the technology. They didn’t consider our studies in UC laboratories to be sufficient. It was ten years of several door slammings,” De La Llera remembers.

The technology they offered alongside the company Vulco, was seismic isolation, which causes the building to “skid” horizontally on its foundations in the event of an earthquake. In addition, they had developed a device for energy dissipation, a technique similar to the classic shock absorber of a motorcycle or car: two points of a structure are connected to an element that absorbs energy produced by a movement and dissipates it into heat.

Finally, the persistence of both UC academics and the constant support of Vulco, allowed them to gain trust in their seismic protection systems. As a result emblematic Chilean buildings withstood the fifth largest earthquake in history which occurred on February 27, 2010.

“The most remembered case is that of dissipators of the Titanium Tower (205 meters high), which was at that moment the tallest in the country. At the time of the earthquakeIt it had not yet been inaugurated and it had no structural damage. Moreover, it is known as one of the most resistant skyscrapers in the world,” De La Llera remembers.

Likewise, there were other constructions that, with SIRVE’s technology, escaped unscathed from the 8.8 magnitude moment to which they were exposed in the 27/F earthquake: Parque Araucano building, UC San Carlos de Apoquindo Clinic, Hospital Militar and Muelle Coronel. “It was a UC Engineering student who helped me install the technology in the Torre Titanium, and another student who

/

came up with the idea of seismically isolating Muelle Coronel,” he acknowledges.

From that event onwards SIRVE’s destiny changed. Testing demanded by businessmen was already applied and they understood that seismic protection devices developed by SIRVE are a necessity, not a luxury. Since then, the company’s projects have tripled in size: in recent times they have participated in the reconstruction of the Basilica del Salvador, the tallest building in New Zealand and the new airport in Lima.

INTERNATIONALIZATION

One of the dreams of the former Dean of UC Faculty of Engineering is that SIRVE will not only conceive and design anti-seismic technology, but also manufacture it. “It is key to produce technology in Chile,” he says, and that is why he is proud that the New Zealand project has installed dissipaters manufactured entirely in our country.

However, given the national and global circumstances because of the Covid-19 pandemic, aspirations for further international growth have been stalled. “In the last years we’ve had substantial growth in manufacturing, but in project development we have

remained stable,” the engineer points out.

It is one of the few companies that maintain a R&D area, mainly with funds obtained from public financing and reinvestment contests.

During this time, the focus has been on lowering costs so that the technology can be applicable in all types of construction, and not only in the most expensive ones.

The SIRVE team is composed of more than 60 people, including outstanding engineers with ample experience in analysis and structural design, design and manufacture of seismic protection devices, and project construction and development in BIM (Building Information Modeling) platforms. Several of them come from UC, which has been a source of enormous talent.

“The ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship of the University, the impetus given to academics to continue our research and doing laboratory work, the support in project application and, incidentally, the human and intellectual quality of the entire community, create a conducive environment for the development of the best ideas,” the academic concludes.

SIRVE CO-FOUNDERS

Juan Carlos De La Llera, former Dean of Engineering, founded SIRVE together with fellow academic Carl Lüders.

SAFE POWER LINES FOR MINING SITES

Safety in the mining industry is the guiding light of this company, founded by the engineer and UC magister Borja Rodriguez.

This image might seem familiar to us: a child running behind a wired remote control car, years ago, when wireless connections did not exist. The game only worked in that way, with the autonomy provided by the length of the cable to the battery-powered vehicle. And that is, sort of, what Electricsafe does, but not as a toy.

The company develops technology for the mining industry, with a lot of focus on a power line in open pit operations. We are talking about 8,000 to 15,000 volt cables and plugs that feed the electric shovels, which in turn load the extraction trucks with two shovels of 200 tons each.

Hence, the power line is nothing more than a series of 300-meter-long extension cables with two industrial plugs at each end. “And each shovel can have 2 or 3 kilometers of cable and you have to be constantly connecting and disconnecting that cable for the operation itself,” explains Borja Rodríguez, UC mechanical industrial engineer and technical director of Electricsafe SpA, founder of the company together with his partner, the electrical engineer Giorgio Rebagliati.

Electricsafe’s main product is a voltage presence indicator ring for the sockets of that power line, a very relevant product in terms of safety: it allows verifying the absence of medium voltage before intervening on the line, i.e. it allows to verify the absence of voltage when making disconnections and handling cables at mining sites.

Rodríguez explains: “The idea was born from conversations with mining clients, regarding another development we have been

working on for the last 10 years: LED mining cables. The clients told us that it was fine to have lights on the cables to prevent damage from being run over, but that they faced a daily risk of arcing upon disconnection. And that is why Electricsafe developed a technology for the needs of the local mining industry”.

Today, their products are used massively in Chile and are exported to countries such as Peru, Mexico, Australia, among others. In addition, the company’s plans include the development of solutions to new emerging

needs of the industry, such as IoT (Internet of Things) mining plugs and illuminating the mining pit.

“We believe that developing technology around the local mining industry is a way to give value to copper, especially if this technology is exported to other markets,” says the engineer, who completed a master’s degree in Innovation at UC. “That was key in consolidating my knowledge and giving me the confidence in relation to the steps we were taking. My thesis was this project of voltage indicators for mining plugs.”

Electricsafe’s development makes it possible to verify the absence of voltage when handling cables at mining sites.

COFOUNDERS OF ELECTRISAFE / Giorgio Rebagliat and Borja Rodríguez, next to mining plugs where accessories that Electricsafe produces are installed.

SIMPLIFYING PERSONAL FINANCES

Investing with no minimum amounts, low commissions and expert advice: this is the Fintual formula, a digital solution of investment and savings with operations in Chile and Mexico.

It was 2016, and the mathematical civil engineer Omar Larré had been thinking for a while about a concrete way for people in Chile to invest in an easy way and totally online. He had been a portfolio manager for some time at one of the largest administrators in Latin America, and a lot of people came up to him to ask where and how to invest. Of course, there was an interest in doing something, but the common factor of all of these cases was that the majority of people did not like the subject of investments and didn’t have the time to research it.

That was the genesis of Fintual, a digital solution for investment and savings with operations in Chile and Mexico. Through technology and process automation, it offers

investments with low commissions and no minimum amounts, and it operates under the regulation of both countries. Currently, it handles the patrimony of 93,000 people and it is available in web format and app for iOS and Android.

“At the time there wasn’t anything good on the market for that retail segment (with not very high amounts to invest), neither in terms of ease of use, nor in terms of how much commission they were charged,” explains Agustín Feuerhake, UC engineer and cofounder of Fintual.

With the completed basal team –Pedro Pineda (CEO), Andrés Marinkovic (CTO), Ómar Larré (CIO) and the aforementioned Agustín (CPO)– Fintual immediately began

its successful path. Soon after, it became the first Chilean start-up to enter Y Combinator (2018), one of the most important accelerators of the world, and also the first to launch its own funds in Hispanic America.

Another landmark was the arrival in Mexico, in 2020, to become the only ones to have fully digital customer on-boarding.

In the words of Agustín Feuerhake, having studied Engineering in UC was a solid base from which to undertake. “Later, Fintual did collaboration projects with University professors, focusing on behavioral sciences, something that it still does to this day,” he says.

He is referring to experiments of different risk simulations, thus, seeing the investment’s impact on people, a kind of photograph of the financial old age and how this could modify the behavior of savings thinking about retirement. Both experiments are sent and in the process of revision to be able to become study papers.

FINTUAL’S FIGURES

70% of people that invest in Fintual are doing it for the first time. The average investment is approximately seven thousand dollars. Of these, 43% are women and 57% are men. The average age of the investor is 34 years. And to keep their clients informed, Fintual has its own weekly communication medium called Fintualist and the weekly podcast Fintalks.

FINTUAL / View of the Fintual application and the organization of investment and savings objectives.

“CAGE” BUILDERS FOR MAGNETIC RESONANCES

A very specific business idea started the enterprise of a professor and its UC alumni, which already has almost 20 years in the industry.

24/7 TRACKING

Since its inception in 2003, Tekemi has in its portfolio a history of more than a thousand developed projects. Today, it designs, manufactures and installs more than 70 per year in the radiology area, in addition to its projects in design and acoustic area. All of these developments are supervised from the beginning by an engineer, even in the field, in any part of the world, which allows solving all of the problems immediately and doing last minute changes.

FROM RESEARCH TO MARKET / The origins of Tekemi are tied to UC Centro de Investigación en Resonancia Magnética.

When in 2003 the Biomedical Imaging Center bought a resonator, they had to obtain electromagnetic shielding. This, also called “Faraday cage”, prevents electromagnetic interference (EMI) that is in the environment –produced by signals from cell phones, radio and television, for example– to enter the room and be confused with the resonance signal coming from the body.

This additional cost made Professor Pablo Irarrázaval detect a business opportunity and, along with his alumni Matías Rosenblitt, decided to explore further. Later, two former UC students tagged along: José Luis Albornoz (current general manager) and Roberto Mir (manager of Tekemi Inc. subsidiary in the United States).

In the beginning, it was an enterprise supported by the Office for Scientific and Technological Research of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Dictuc S.A.), but today it has forged its own path. And from manufacturing and installing electromagnetic shielding for resonance equipment, it went on to diversify its business considerably.

At the present time they also offer services such as measurements to certify the place before installing the resonator, designing magnetic shielding and installing audiovisual equipment in the resonator room.

They also work in the acoustic area, which takes advantage of their production capacities to make acoustic shielding for engine-generators, such as those used in data centers, silencers for noisy industrial equipment, acoustic panels and audiometric cabins.

Tekemi is one of the first enterprises constituted as a spin-off of Universidad Católica.

“We are very satisfied, because the company was able to forge a path in a difficult industry and we are able to say that we are the most important ‘cage’ provider in Latin America. We are present in America, from the United States to Chile, and we have done sporadically some business in Europe and Oceania,” professor Irarrázaval details.

The link to the University was natural, since the Fondef project in which one of the partners was working in, and the Biomedical Imaging Center belong to UC. Later, they obtained the support of Dictuc S.A., which provided them with work capital and a space in San Joaquín Campus.

Currently, Tekemi sells six “cages” per month and its goal is to keep growing in its business lines as well as geographically, to become a company with a global reach.

A TEAM OF EXCELLENCE / Currently they manage 70 projects per year in the radiology, design and acoustic areas.

Among other services, Tekemi develops “cages” that prevent electromagnetic interference in the environment –signals from cell phones, radio and television, for example– from entering the room and being confused with the resonance signal coming from the body.

PRICING, SHIFT Y ROUTING

EFFICIENCY MANAGEMENT OF PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

PROFESSORS /

The professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Juan Carlos Ferrer, has developed mechanisms to find innovative solutions to understanding consumer behavior in retail (Pricing), boosting the productivity of the workforce in organizations (Shift) and improving route planning (Routing), which are born from his research in UC School of Engineering.

EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL

Workforce management (WFM) is a set of integrated processes that a company utilizes to optimize its employees’ productivity. It implies predicting in an effective manner the workforce requisites and creating and managing staff schedules to do a particular task, day by day and hour by hour. For example, in a call center, this technology helps to maximize the efficiency of the human team by predicting the volume of transactions (calls, messages or e-mails) and scheduling the right amount of workers with the right skills, at the right time, to handle the volume of expected transactions.

Juan Carlos Muñoz,

Juan Carlos Ferrer and Ricardo Giesen.

UNDERSTANDING THE CONSUMER

One of the activities professor Juan Carlos Ferrer got involved with in 2002, after developing his Doctorate degree in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was modeling consumer behavior to propose good demand projections, and the development of customized softwares. The idea was to offer technological solutions that would allow generating definitions of optimal inventory and pricing policies, all with the goal of improving organizations’ operations and decisions.

As a result, in the year 2006 Pricing was created as the business unit of the Office for Scientific and Technological Research of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Dictuc S.A. To put it into action, Juan Carlos Ferrer got the support from a small retail store (data, economical resources and time of its executives) to start building the software’s first models and versions.

This alliance has enabled Pricing to successfully develop projects in different industries, hand in hand with large companies, becoming a spin-off company of Dictuc in 2014.

“We commit ourselves to solving complex issues through innovative analytical methodologies to understand the consumer’s behavior. Our future goal is to continue developing flexible tools and that they add each time more value to the different industries we support, regardless of the scenario we are facing,” Ferrer explains.

EFFICIENT WORKFORCE

The improvement of management processes has always been the engine of professor Juan Carlos Ferrer’s research. As a result, in 2005 he participated alongside the academic Juan Carlos Muñoz, of the Department of Transportation and Logistics Engineering, in a study about an unresolved problem in a Chilean retail store: organizing people’s

“We are committed to solving complex problems, through innovative analytical methodologies to understand the behavior of the consumer,” says the founder of Pricing, the professor of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Juan Carlos Ferrer.

shifts so that they were present when they were most needed. “We managed to successfully apply the results of our research in an important national company, showing that it was possible to define shifts that were far superior to the manual organization they were performing,” explains the UC Engineering academic.

That is how in 2006 both academics founded Shift as a commercial unit within UC, through Dictuc S.A. That year was characterized by the development of the first version of the software for shift management. Given the service robustness and the trust of its clients, it transformed into a spin-off company of Dictuc S.A. in 2014.

Today, Shift is a leading company in workforce management in Latin America. Its mission is to support its clients to have an efficient administration of its workforce, while also taking into account the culture of each company. Thus, it has a powerful forecasting module demand and offers a web platform to centralize shift planning processes, automatically and in reduced times: it assigns shifts when and where they are needed.

As part of his achievements, the UC academic says that they have been able to successfully have foreign clients in several countries. “We know the differentiators with respect to the international competition, so the next step is to strengthen the expansion in Latin America by opening offices in new countries,” Juan Carlos Ferrer states. Since 2018, Shift has an office in Peru and it will focus in 2023 its efforts on expanding into Mexico and Brazil.

DEFINING OPTIMAL ROUTES

While Juan Carlos Ferrer was in his sabbatical year in MIT, in 2010, a Brazilian NGO approached him whose purpose was to teach literacy in rural zones in Brazil. They proposed to carry out a research project to reduce the high cost of transporting school children in the municipalities, so that the savings could be used for literacy. This was the spark that illuminated the idea of Routing.

Together with Ricardo Giesen, professor of UC Department of Transportation and Logistics Engineering, he worked on a project that consisted of defining optimal routes, school locations and their respective capacities (even opening and closing schools), in order to minimize the total costs of transporting children between their homes and schools.

12 years have passed since that first order and after experiencing the difficulties of creating enterprises, in 2017 they founded Routing as a new spin-off of Dictuc S.A., which today has more than 25 clients in Chile and provides recurring services in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. In addition, it has grown over 300% in the last five years in terms of invoicing. The company combines consulting with the development of proprietary software to support the operational management of its clients.

“Today, our services reach more than 300,000 people a month, which are directly planned and mobilized using the tools developed by Routing. Among them are LATAM personnel, ACHS, Mutual and Teletón patients, among others,” exemplifies the UC academic.

EARTHQUAKE-SAFE WINE TANKS

An UC Engineer team, led by Professor Luis Almazán, found the key to keeping one of the country’s most precious national treasures protected against earthquakes.

Two essential aspects in Chilean identity were the starting point of this project: wine and tremors. The question José Luis Almazán, professor at UC School of Engineering, asked himself in 2005 was how he could develop seismic protection devices for an industry unaccustomed to these phenomena.

“We started with the wine industry as a particular case where poor seismic performance could be predicted in the face of large magnitude events. This ‘suspicion’ arose after getting to know a modern vineyard in which all of the wine was stored in thin-walled stainless steel tanks, the design of which comes from non-seismic countries, such as Spain and France,” the academic remembers.

And it was the earthquake of the 27th of February 2010 that also shook up his idea: the national wine industry lost 125,000,000 liters of wine due to damage to the tanks containing liquids.

Thus, together with a team of researchers and for five years, Professor Almazán did studies through a Fondecyt project, five master’s thesis and two doctoral dissertations. All of this body of knowledge resulted in a set of flexible devices that are installed on the supports of liquid containers, which are able to protect the storage structures against horizontal and vertical ground movements caused by earthquakes.

This system can be scaled to the size and weight that needs to be protected, and it is also effective for industrial equipment of all types, from electrical generators to high-precision medical equipment such as scanners.

“After the difficulty of coming up with a solution, we needed to form an alliance with a company willing to do innovation. In 2016 we made it real through a Fondef project of Technological Research (Fondef-IT). The successful completion of this project led to the signing of the licensing contract,” Professor Almazán remembers.

Today, the research team is trying to extend the use of the developed technology not only to the wine and related industries, but also to mining and electrical substations, among others. Both for this project as well as the previous work, Almazán recognizes that UC has played a fundamental role.

“First, because of the great capacity of its students and the laboratory infrastructure that allowed the development of pre-industrial and industrial prototypes. Second, because of the extraordinary quality and commitment of the professionals of the Office of Transfer and Development that supported us – and still do – from the beginning. And third, because of the innovation culture that the University and the School of Engineering have been sustaining and deepening over the last 10 years.”

“The

innovation culture that Universidad Católica and the School of Engineering have been sustaining and expanding over the last 10 years. was fundamental for this project,” Professor José Luis Almazán says.

JOSÉ LUIS ALMAZÁN /

The academic in Engineering was born in Mendoza, a city that plays a leading role in Argentina’s wine industry.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND CORFO AWARDS

The main achievement of Almazán and his team has been the licensing of, at least, three devices to one of the leading companies in the market, Tersainox S.A. One of these technologies has already been implemented in four projects. This development won the Technology Transfer Award 2018 from Corfo: First place in the Research Equipment category for the Development of Seismic Protection Technologies for Fluid Storage Ponds and Industrial Equipment. The technologies created at UC are protected by patents.

SOFTWARE FOR EFFICIENT LAND MANAGEMENT

A complex problem, with many associated variables, is the decision making that must be made by land managers. To help them not to make mistakes, UC academic Roberto Moris has led the creation of a service through software.

INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAM / It is made up by researchers of the faculties of Agronomy and Architecture, Design and Urban Studies.

HAND IN HAND WITH UC

The relationship between UC and CAPCA predates recent years. Roberto Moris and his team were able to forge relationships that led to the convergence of a sophisticated understanding of what territorial management is because of the University’s support. Thus, all of the research projects that precede this software have been made alongside UC in association with several entities such as municipalities, regional governments, the British embassy, Coldelco, Corfo, Conicyt/ ANID and Subdere, among others.

Roberto Moris, an academic at UC School of Architecture and the Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies, headed the Fondef IT project “Predictive model of carrying capacity for sustainable management” and has a wealth of experience in identifying and resolving urban problems.

This initiative, developed alongside an interdisciplinary group of researchers of UC faculties of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering, and of Architecture, Design and Urban Studies, resulted in the CAPCA software. It is a technological tool that allows municipalities to understand the behavior of a series of variables of interest and to project the impact of the population on their resources and services, in order to promote integrated and sustainable planning over time.

Although the software began to be developed in 2018, the applied research work on carrying capacity started much earlier. As early as 2009, it began in Rapa Nui with a first carbon footprint calculation study, which was replicated in Juan Fernández.

“The 27F tsunamigenic earthquake led us to develop the first multi-hazard survey in 26 coastal localities in the Maule and O’Higgins regions. We also supported the municipality of Pelluhue with its Reconstruction Plan, an assistance model that we replicated after the Atacama floods of 2015 and 2017. And in the communes of Chañaral and Diego de Almagro we implemented the assistance program for the municipalities for the evaluation of actions and their operation in recovery. Between 2016 and 2018, the Rapa Nui demographic carrying capacity model was developed for the implementation of the Residency Law,” UC architect says.

This background helped to, through the Fondef, create a carrying capacity software that would capitalize on the experience with Rapa Nui and allow any territory to access a prediction system, in order to know and evaluate the impact of the population, both resident and transient, on the various resources and services present in the territory.

IMPROVING MANAGEMENT

/ CAPCA facilitates the integrated analysis of data and predicts the impact of various variables on the territory.

This tool was developed through collaborative work with the El Quisco municipality. And since the last months of 2022, thanks to the support of the Hubtec Consortium, a third phase is also being implemented with the municipalities of Renca and Pirque, in the Metropolitan Region.

“Today, decisions regarding social and/or investment projects are made in isolation without being able to measure their impact on other variables of interest in the territory. And, above all, without knowing if they are indeed a priority in the face of problems faced by the locality. What CAPCA does is provide municipalities with an instrument that provides them with analyzed local information, considering projections and the opinion of the community and the various stakeholders that converge in the territory,” Moris explains.

In this way, the software’s goal is to become a fundamental tool for integrated territorial planning, where the results are part of the relevant information for the project application for the social profitability evaluation systems.

By knowing the status of the variables of interest with respect to their demographic

carrying capacity, municipalities can anticipate the occurrence of problems related to the management and use of natural resources, the collapse of basic services, gaps between demand and supply of resources and services, and social conflicts or the lack of coverage for new residents.

THE PLANS OF CAPCA

In the future, the team behind CAPCA hopes to achieve the key learning to face the fourth phase of project implementation, which will broaden the spectrum of municipalities that will use the software for their territorial management. At the same time, the implementation of the model on islands in Chile and abroad, such as Galapagos and San Andreas, have been explored. They are also working with Unesco to explore its application in biodiversity reserves.

“It is not enough to have a multidisciplinary team, but also to have a genuine interest in exploring territorial management from a transdisciplinary perspective,” Moris concludes.

VIDELA Y ASOCIADOS S.A.

CONSTRUCTION SAFETY AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT

Since 1996, this society has contributed to the construction industry applying engineering knowledge through quality control, project management and technology transfer.

ON THE WINGS OF DICTUC S.A. / Carlos Videla, Engineering academic, founded the company alongside the former student Daniel Díaz.

Videla y Asociados’ main line of business is engineering and architectural consulting, technology transfer and development, and project management and technical inspection. It was created in 1996 and today enjoys a recognized prestige that has led many organizations, institutions and companies to request its services to intervene in a variety of fields within the construction industry.

“The idea was born many years ago, when a former student asked the dean of UC Engineering at that time for a quality management system for the real estate and construction companies where he was working. At the time, the authority got in touch with us and requested our response to this challenge. After that, history was made,” says Carlos Videla, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Videla y Asociados and professor emeritus of our university.

Thus, it began as an agency derived from the Quality and Technical Inspection Service (CIT Project), a unit originated in the Dictuc S.A.

The CIT Project was in charge of providing quality control services for the construction industry, focused on verifying during the execution of the work and in the field, compliance with a standard defined on the basis of the regulations in force and applicable to this specialty, and by the specifications.

“UC link has been a great part of our history; we spent five years operating on its premises and from there came the founding partners, thus UC DNA flows through our veins. This is seen daily in the commitment to excellence, supporting our clients beyond what the contract states. That is how we take responsibility for the bond from which we come from and the degree of trust in this emblem,” professor Videla states.

With 26 years of operation, Videla y Asociados –composed of Carlos Videla Cifuentes, UC civil engineer, University of Birmingham

“UC link has been a great part of our history; we spent five years operating on its premises and from there came the founding partners, thus UC DNA flows through our veins”, professor Carlos Videla states.

PhD, UK; René Guerra Cañete, UC civil engineer; Daniel Díaz Medina, UC civil engineer; and Carlos Videla Reyes, Universidad Mayor architect– is currently an organization with activities in Chile, Peru and Ecuador, with important clients from the public and private sectors, and for their accomplishments, a few of them have been recognized with honors.

“We develop and generate a methodology and successful application of control procedures and a quality assurance service. We also venture into technology transfer processes to the construction industry to develop new applications for the execution and control of construction processes, and thus the generation of new services,” professor Videla explains.

Among its main achievements is the application of innovative systems, such as high standard industrial flooring.

As for the transfer of knowledge, they provide advice through methods to solve various problems associated with concrete construction, strength estimation and determination of the causes of pathologies that occur in reinforced concrete structures, among others.

It is also important for Videla y Asociados to participate in technical inspection of renowned or relevant projects, since this type of work has allowed to incorporate innovations in the industry and/or generate significant impacts on the community.

“Like any entrepreneurship, the road has not been without its ups and downs, the important thing has been in what way we have overcome the downs, consolidating ourselves as a team and searching for the

light in times of darkness. At the end of the day, the companies that last are the ones that show what they are made of and the robustness of its foundations. In this whole journey, the relationship with UC has been a very important part,” Videla assures.

INTERNATIONAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Videla y Asociados played a leading role in the first application in Chile of post-tensioned floors with a high quality finish, for Casa Piedra S.A. As a result, it obtained the Golden Trowel Award (international award given to the best floors in high planimetry), in recognition for the materialization of the largest post-tensioned flat floor in the world in the construction of the Distribution Center for Nestlé. This experience led to replicating the application of this technology in Ecuador and Peru.

SPECIALIST IN IMPROVING BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

This enterprise has more than 100 companies as clients, who have benefitted from its methodology focused on reducing inefficiencies and increasing value.

WHAT IS LEAN MANAGEMENT?

Lean Management originated in the automobile company Toyota, in Japan. After World War II, the company was able to produce the same volume that it was selling. Lean is about reducing waste such as wasted time, unnecessary effort and expenses not related to increased productivity or profit.

20 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE /

The team is pioneer in implementing Lean and Last Planner methodologies in Chile.

Gepro specializes in improving the company’s management and productivity, pioneer in Lean Management in Chile. Today, it is a spin-off of Dictuc S.A., but it emerged after the creation of the Centro de Excelencia en Gestión de Producción (www.gepuc.cl) in 2002, as participating companies began to demand support services based on computer systems. In its early days, the Center was financed by the UC Centers program and partner companies of the Chilean Chamber of Construction. Then, it is subsequent development that led to the formation of Gepro, it obtained financing from Fondef, Corfo, Fundación Andes and numerous companies that support R&D projects.

Currently, officially constituted as Gepro Spa (www.gepro.cl), its goal is for organizations to achieve their maximum performance, reducing inefficiencies and increasing value through innovative methodologies and tools, and promoting a culture of continuous improvement.

Since its inception, it has counseled dozens of companies in the most diverse areas of economic activity: engineering, construction, mining, public and private clients, manufacturers, ministries and services.

In addition, it has had international clients in countries such as Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia and Costa Rica.

“We have become a benchmark in the area of Lean Management and also in digital transformation. Furthermore, we created the Gepro Academy, which is in charge of the formation and distribution of knowledge in Lean systems, providing experienced rapporteurs to UC’s postgraduate and extension programs in their specialties. We have trained people from dozens of companies and organizations in our country,” says Luis Alarcón, UC Engineering academic and founder of this entrepreneurship.

LUIS FERNANDO ALARCÓN /

He is an engineering academic and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the engineering company Gepro.

The main difficulties the company has faced is related to the fact that it is still young and small, for which they have had some barriers to entry to participate in major projects that require more experience and financial backing.

Alarcón explains that there is an initial lack of knowledge of Lean Management issues in the country, which has required an effort to educate.

Its future bet is on scaling up the capacity to influence the environment with new support systems and asynchronous distance education.

As far as the UC support, Dictuc S.A. has played an important role in helping to overcome difficulties through advice and mentoring at the management level.

In addition, its founder states that the University has supported the education of the medium through extension programs in Lean Management.

Gepro’s goal is for organizations to achieve their maximum performance, reducing inefficiencies and incrementing value through innovative methodologies and tools.

VIRTUAL REALITY TO IMPROVE PRODUCTIVE TASKS

Pignus is a technology company that, since 2018, is focused on generating tools to strengthen the human capital of organizations. Its great development is Rehaviour, a technology that allows assessing the behavioral gaps of operational and supervisory workers, through virtual reality and predictive behavioral models. These tools are capable of generating instant reportability to make prevention and training decisions, by detecting behavioral gaps that are directly related to accident proneness. Rehaviour is self-managed and is used in the facilities of each company.

The great development of Pignus is Rehaviour,a technology that allows assessing the behavioral gaps of workers through virtual reality.

For Pignus, the Universidad Católica has been fundamental to be able to boost its growth. The relationship started after the team won the Silver category in the Jump Chile 2018 program and were awarded a mentoring scholarship. “The Rehaviour technology tool is able to identify the behavioral galps of workers in industrial sectors, using gamified virtual reality environment and artificial intelligence. With that we generate an instant reportability about the skills and conducts of the people in a web platform. In this way, companies have objective information to make training and prevention decisions for their human capital.” Felipe Sanhieza, CEO and founder of Pignus.

BETTER PURCHASES

Sumatoid, supported in 2019 by the Incuba UC of the UC Innovation Center, is focused on digitalizing the physical world in order to improve the customer’s operations and actions. In stores, it connects to existing CCTV cameras and uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to provide real-time visualization of what is happening in the store. Through the Akira platform, it utilizes a software to generate alerts, recommendations, KPI, forecasting and action plans to create optimal user experiences. The objective is to improve store operating margins with all this information. It operates in Argentina, Chile and Peru.

“The UC played an important role in Sumatoid in the organization of the administrative and financial part, and in the preparation of some documents. At the same time, they gave us an appraisal of the company that helped us understand some general concepts of what investors are looking for and prepare us to be able to scale up with external financing.

The most important milestone in our growth was to be able to find, early on, that first customer for whom our solutions can contribute to improving user experience and lowering operating margins. Understanding their pains helped us to generate a more solid and validated product, so that we could quickly reach other customers.” Diego Descotte, CMO & Co-founder.

GAUSS CONTROL

Sumatoid allows, through artificial intelligence and computer vision, to improve the shopping experience of a store’s customers.

gausscontrol.com

PREDICTING ERRORS WITH

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Gauss Control’s business consists in predicting and reducing workplace accidents, mainly vehicular. Its purpose is to save lives and improve human performance, with a holistic focus centered on people. It does this through a platform that uses artificial intelligence to create complex prediction and error management networks by collecting data from sensors, telemetry and GPS located in vehicles, so that the system “learns” and generates increasingly accurate forecasts. It uses a predictive model of fatigue, provides information that companies did not have before, methodologies and risk management of human capital, which allows them to lower their occupational accidents from 30-50% to 70%.

“The first research project we did with Luis Rizzi, professor of the Department of Transportation and Logistics Engineering, and Dictuc S.A. It was our first accident prediction model. Our big milestone so far has been when in front of our first client, Copec, we were able to demonstrate that Gauss Control reduced accidents by around 50%.” José Rafael Campino, CEO of Gauss Control.

Gauss Control uses a predictive fatigue model and helps reduce workplace accidents.

SPIN-OFF UC

COMPANIES CREATED SPECIFICALLY TO COMMERCIALIZE RESEARCH RESULTS, IN WHICH MEMBERS OF OUR UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY PARTICIPATE AND TO WHOM UC TECHNOLOGY IS LICENSES UNDER PREFERENTIAL CONDITIONS.

Source: 2022 report of the UC Office of Transfer and Development.

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

digital trans for ma tion

CONCEPTOSPARAENTENDERLA INNOVACIÓN

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

STARTUPS

BUSINESSES WITH ENORMOUS POTENTIAL FOR GROWTH THAT ARE STILL IN THEIR INFANCY. THEY ARE CHARACTERIZED BY BEING A SCALABLE BUSINESS, I.E., THEY GROW QUICKLY AND SUSTAINABLY.

Source: Lab to market program of the UC Office of Transfer and Development.

digital trans for ma tion

PIONEERS IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

This technology project, which was born in the Department of Computer Science of the UC School of Engineering, has 112 contributors today and has offices in Chile, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSABILITY (CSR)

Solex is committed to society, the environment and its customers. For this reason they develop different actions in line with CSR, such as the support to the Fundación Nocedal, which provides free, quality education to children in conditions of extreme poverty or high vulnerability. In addition, they encourage multiculturalism in their teams, promote the circular economy and the use of renewable energies, along with declaring their adherence to the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) code of business conduct.

Solex is a 30-year-old global company dedicated to delivering world-class technology solutions, with a focus on supporting businesses with reliable and innovative solutions related to digital transformation. It provides implementation services, license sales, consulting, continuous improvement, and upgrade and currently has offices in Chile, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Its origins date back to 1989, as a project within the Department of Computer Science of the School of Engineering of the Universidad Católica, until Solex was born in 1993 in the premises of Dictuc S.A.

“The company was born from an idea I brough back from my doctorate degree in Switzerland, with Sandoz (Novartis today), in the year 1989, consisting of an interactive system using artificial intelligence techniques from the 80’s and 90’s for industrial planning,” explains Miguel Nussbaum, professor and director of the UC Department of Computer Science.

Solex was the first start-up to come out of the UC School of Engineering and from the beginning it partnered with Sonda, a company that was interested in promoting research results in the area. They received a huge boost and strong commercial impulse from this.

“The Universidad Católica was the starting engine of this company. It was always present, because through the students that participated in the project we were able to make, first, the research and, then proceed to turn this into a product and present it to the commercial management. Afterwards, by partnering up with Sonda, we were able to strengthen a relationship that still exists,” professor Nussbaum adds.

The company finally left the San Joaquín Campus at the end of 1998, when the founding engineers acquired their share from the UC and are now Sonda’s main partners in Solex.

From the beginning, the project was successful. It started developing systems for logistics using artificial intelligence techniques, which changed according to market needs over time.

“To fulfill our mission and vision, we have a consolidated team of highly trained professionals, who allow us to develop and deliver unique solutions for each client. In Solex we are committed to continuously build solid relationships with them, to convert their business needs into ours and, with that, grow together,” maintains Jorge Hoyl, general manager of Solex, civil industrial engineer of the Universidad Católica.

MIGUEL NUSSBAUM

Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the UC School of Engineering.

Solex was the first start-up to come out of the UC School of Engineering and from the beginning it partnered with Sonda, a company that was interested in promoting research results in the area.

THE CHALLENGE OF PRICING

FINANCIAL INSTRUMENTS

The financial market needs fair and trustworthy prices to be able to operate. This is what this enterprise offers, which has already earned the trust of over 150 companies.

OFFICIAL MUTUAL FUND PRICING PROVIDER

RiskAmerica has more than 10 years of experience as a leader in the valuation of local fixed income instruments. Since 2006, it has been the official pricing provider for the Mutual Fund industry and its valuations are widely used in other industries in the local market, such as banks, stockbrokers and insurance companies. It is also the official supplier of the Superintendence of Pensions for the calculation of the AFP price vector.

RISKAMERICA TEAM / Gonzalo Cortázar (center) is an engineering academic and leader of the RiskAmerica team. In the right corner is Nicolás Majluf, co-founder of RiskAmerica and UC academic.

The UC Engineering alumnus Gonzalo Cortázar was doing his doctorate studies in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),in the early 1990’s. That is where he decided to dedicate himself fully, together with his professor Eduardo Schwartz, to the development of methodologies for valuing commodity futures and, in particular, copper and oil.

That is how RiskAmerica was born, an enterprise that builds methodologies for valuation of financial instruments, with the goal of delivering accurate, trustworthy and independent information to an emerging and illiquid market such as the Chilean one.

“Back in Chile I build a team together with the professor Nicolás Makluf and professor Schwartz, with whom I elaborated several Fondef, Fondecyt and other research projects on related subjects. All in my capacity as a professor at the UC School of Engineering,” Cortázar says.

The first initiative of this dream team that obtained Fondef financing was, precisely, RiskAmerica. This ocurred in the year 2000 and since then they have applied techniques similar to those of commodity prices, but in bonds traded in Chile and whose valuation was very complex.

“We detected that there was a strong need in the Chilean financial market to have accu -

WHY A BACK OFFICE?

ON THE WINGS

OF DICTUC S.A. / RiskAmerica, information and financial engineering services, was created in 2015 and sold in 2020.

The back office concept is associated with following up with customers to improve business procedures, organize payroll and manage inventory control, among other activities. And since 2020, RiskAmerica has implemented this management concept thanks to its long experience in the local market, with more than 15 years delivering valuations and financial engineering and information services to the industry. “There are important synergies between the services and valuations that RiskAmerica delivers and the necessary processes and information to submit a new standard of back office service,” the company says.

rate prices –reliable and provided by entities without conflict of interest– of fixed income instruments that had not been recently traded in the markets,” the current UC academic explains. And he contextualizes its importance: “Not only is this information relevant for financial institutions, but also for millions of people who had their savings in the AFPs, mutual funds and others, who would be negatively affected in their pensions or savings because of mistakes in valuations of the existing instruments in the investment portfolios of the institutions.”

Despite the team’s experience and robustness, they experienced difficulties in presenting themselves to financial market executives. They had to convince them, with a lot of dedication, that from “the academy” there was knowledge that could be useful for the market and that the services they offered were going to remain in time.

The support of the UC has been fundamental for RiskAmerica in its already 22 years of history. When in 2005 they started submitting services to the market, they used the legal structure of Dictuc S.A., as the company of the University. During this stage, the different market players were convinced, one by one, of the quality and reliability of this service.

In 2015, given their rapid growth and recognition as a reference for the national market, they became a spin off: RiskAmerica SpA.

“Today, we permanently serve 150 companies, including banks, AFPs, mutual funds, insurance companies, etc., as well as regulatory institutions such as the Central Bank of Chile, the Ministry of Finance, etc.

The professional team is small, but highly qualified, and most of them are UC alumni,” concludes Cortázar.

THE LEGAL PLATFORM FOR GLOBAL COMPANIES

The purpose of this venture is to facilitate the processing of contracts, the creation of companies and a number of legal procedures.

Lexgo provides legal infrastructure for web companies in Latin America, allowing them to complete their legal processes faster and at a fraction of the price of a lawyer. By automating legal workflows, would-be company founders can create, raise funding and hire their team seamlessly and in different countries across the region.

The idea behind this enterprise arose when partners Leonardo Barrientos and Juan José Figueroa realized that there was no way to make quality legal services available if an important part of its execution was not automated. So, they created a software whose first version allowed them to offer solutions ten times cheaper than traditional providers, supporting many more customers at a price they can afford.

That is how they arrived at the UC, in 2018, to be advised by the UC Innovation Center Red de Mentores (Mentoring Network). After said participation, they were part of one of the acceleration programs offered by Incuba UC, to subsequently begin to act as partners of the same. “In the latter capacity, we have conducted workshops for other University programs, offered preferential use of our platform for the creation and start-up of new companies, and even par-

Lexgo provides automated legal support for those who want to create a company, raise financing and hire their team seamlessly and in different countries of the region.

ticipated as network mentors,” explains the cofounder and CEO Leonardo Barrientos.

In 2021, Lexgo had the trust of almost 300 companies, both domestic and foreign, that use the platform to expand and grow their businesses in Latin America. With this background, they received investment from angel investors, investors and international accelerators, with which the founders envision tripling their subscription revenues, launching their services in Mexico and raising a seed found to accelerate their commercial efforts.

ARRIVAL AT UC

Lexgo joined the UC after completing an incubation process with Start-Up Chile, with a failed B2C (business to consumer) product. “We managed to retool the product and start growing steadily. The UC provides us with the necessary support and has allowed us to educate other companies about the best practices and ideal structures that their businesses need,” details CEO Leonardo Barrientos.

LEXGO COFOUNDERS / Leonardo Barrientos and Juan José Figueroa in the offices of Lexgo in Santiago.

DIGITALIZING FINANCIAL INFORMATION

The technology company created by UC alumni Nicolás de Camino and Sebastián Kreis provides financing and liquidity to thousands of companies in Chile and Mexico through a completely digital user experience.

With the vision of becoming the B2B fintech of Latam (business to business financial technology), today Xepelin is a 100% digital platform of financial solutions which offers access to liquidity through receivable finances, deferral and payment of payable accounts, a supplier payment platform and financial management software, among other digital services.

The development of this enterprise consists of a management software in which companies can enroll and activate free of charge. There they can find and sort their financial information, such as revenues, costs, customers, sales, suppliers, plan payments, view liquidity and tax payments. In addition they can request financing, which is the wat Xepelin generates income.

With more than 20,000 clients between Chile and Mexico, Xepelin has already finances, in about three years, more than US$ 1.5 billion. Its founders are Nicolás de Camino and Sebastián Kreis, former students of UC Commercial Engineering and UC Civil Electrical Engineering, respectively.

“The University helped us to prepare ourselves and probable our paths ended up joining the dots to Xepelin. We realized that only 3% or 5% of the top companies in Chile and Latin America have access to financial services, but that there are still 95% of companies that the traditional market does not cover. That is our niche,” explains Nicolás de Camino.

With more than 20,000 clients between Chile and Mexico, Xepelin has already financed, in about three years, more than US$1.5 billion.

XEPELIN FUNCTIONS / Illustrative image of the financial services platform.

THE APP THAT CHANGED THE WAY WE SHOP

Two former UC Engineering students, Daniel Undurraga and Juan Pablo Cuevas, gave us Cornershop through innovation and entrepreneurship.

Excited with the idea that the future was in the software, two former UC Engineering students Daniel Undurraga and Juan Pablo Cuevas have been working together for more than 20 years. They met on the San Joaquín Campus and –from then on– joined by an international partner, Óscar Hjertonsson, created three successful companies: Needish (which allowed them to spend some time in Silicon Valley), Clan Descuento (that they sold to Groupon) and Cornershop.

The latter is an application and service, that works as an intermediary platform for the online purchase of groceries through mobile devices, which are then delivered to the site requested by the user. Although it does not sound unfamiliar, Cornershop revolutionized the supermarket industry in terms of online shopping and home delivery.

Founded in 2015, the idea consisted in providing expedited delivery and personalized shopping, in which the customer gives direct instructions to a shopper with a name and surname, who solves the problems when not finding a product or checking the quality of them. “We give the customer back free time, with a first-class service at a reasonable price,” says Daniel Undurraga, cofounder and current CTO of the company.

To get started with this venture, the three partners put up their savings and asked their families and friends for help: they raised 300,000 dollars. To reach one million they had to go to San Francisco, the city known as

the Mecca of innovation and raising capital for risky ventures. Then they looked for talent, trained the first shoppers and recruited 500 potential customers. Their bet was to limit growth and start operations in Santiago and Mexico at the same time.

Only two years after its launch, Cornershop already managed to raise 30 million dollars and, in 2018, Walmart tried to buy it. And although the deal did not go through, a few years later it was announced that Uber had managed to convince the UC alumni and its Swedish partner to sell it a majority stake in the startup. And in the middle of the pandemic, when the e-commerce shopping boom was in full swing, on July 6, 2020,

Cornershop by Uber was born. Uber paid US$362 million for 55% of the Chilean unicorn and US$94 million more for the same percentage of the Mexican operation.

At this new stage, the app has managed to be present in Chile, Mexico, Peru, Canada, the United States, Costa Rica and Brazil. In July 2021, Uber ended up acquiring 100% of the company.

“We continue working on Cornershop and we are proud of what we have achieved. As a company, we impacted hundreds of thousands of shoppers, we have millions of customers and we are more than 2,600 employees,” Undurraga concludes.

CORNERSHOP / View of the smartphone application.

HEALTHCARE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

This startup is devoted to digitalizing the journey of the patient and thus improving access to healthcare in Latin America.

In 2019, UC industrial engineers Alejandro Yung, Martín Cruz and Álvaro de la Barra joined forces to form an enterprise with the goal of implementing technology in hospitals and clinics. All of them had previous experience in the field and knew of the great problematic of access that exists in Latin America: only one out of every two patients manages to access timely health care.

“To improve this situation, we have worked on giving an un-scaled experience to the patient –very similar to what is applied in apps such as Uber, Airbnb and Rappi– in the least digitalized industry of the world,” says Cruz, who, like his two partners, comes from a family related to the healthcare field.

Keirón offers solutions for face-to-face care management, automation of appointment confirmation with artificial intelligence and monitoring of pick-up and delivery in hospital pharmacies.

The solutions offered by Keirón have to do with the management of face-to-face services, as well as the automation of appointment confirmation with artificial intelligence.

In addition, they offer innovative services, such as pick-up and delivery, which gives hospital pharmacies a pizzeria-like operation: scheduled pick-ups and routed dispenses. They are the only ones that have a solution focused on clinical budgets: they

issue quotations in a minute, more accurate and with higher conversion, since integration with your CRM allows you to track patients.

“The UC has been a good partner in attracting talent, from internships to trainees to degree work,” Cruz explains. “In addition, twenty of our collaborators are from UC Engineering and we are working to improve the budgets of the Red Salud UC Christus,” he adds.

MAIN ACHIEVEMENTS

In the short history of Keirón, its partners have accumulated achievements. They already have operations in Chile, Mexico and Peru, and have more than 200 hospitals and high complexity laboratories as clients. Its market share is significant: 55% in the high segment of private clinics and 20% in public hospitals. Its goal is to achieve a greater presence in the Mexican market, for which reason they have already installed a sales team there. With this, they hope to become the biggest healthtech of Latin America.

THE KEIRÓN TEAM /

Martín Cruz (CEO), Álvaro de la Barra (CRO) and Alejandro Yung (CPO) in the offices of the company.

TECHNOLOGY THAT FOSTERS TALENT IN THE WORKFORCE

A software created by UC Engineering alumnus Jaime Arrieta automates tasks of human resources teams in companies.

All the IT talent of Jaime Arrieta, UC Engineering alumnus, came to light when he found himself doing consulting work for a company to improve the Human Resources area and saw what a mess it was.

“They were paying the end-of-month payouts and already had to start with the following one; there wasn’t any information to make decisions. I wondered how this could not have a solution,” he reflects today.

Coincidentally, he soon left to study for an MBA in the United States. That is where he met his would-be partners and founders of Buk: Santiago Lira and Felipe Sateler. In the first stage, they were joined by other UC students at the time, such as Ricardo Sateler and Teresita Moran.

His enterprise consists of offering comprehensive people management software for companies, which allows them to meet all the needs of their employees: from the payment of salaries to their professional development.

This, with the aim of creating happier work places, so that the time will be used in the management of talent and won’t get lost in tasks that can be automated.

INNOVATIVE COMPANY

“The idea behind Buk is born in 2017, when I realized that there were a lot of companies spending time filling out templates and calculating data, and did not have the time to focus on what matters the most: being close to people and leveraging their talents,” remembers Jaime Arrieta.

For Buk, the 2019-2022 Chilean protests were eye-opening. Its founder says that, in those

In 2002, Buk obtained the first place as HR Tech in the Most Innovative Companies 2022 ranking. This list is made every year by the ESE Business School Chile, in partnership with the newspaper El Mercurio and the consulting firm MIC Innovation.

days, there was an internal call that told them they had to give something back to society.

“And it was there Buk Starter was born, which seeks to offer completely free of charge, for life, and without fine print, a tool for the payment of salaries and people management to SMEs with less than 20 employees,” Arrieta says.

To date, Buk has more than four thousand clients in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico, which translates into more than 700,000 collaborators. In addition, its team is composed of more than 700 “bukers”, as they internally call their workers, who are tasked with creating happier jobs.

BUK PLATFORM FEATURES / Illustrative image of the features of the integrated people management software.

COMMUNITY SECURITY ON YOUR PHONE

An UC engineer and his best friend developed a technology that enables you to handle crises in the community as a result of a negative personal experience.

How could there not be a kind of Uber for emergencies, where you press a button on an app and it sends you the nearest available patrol car? That is the question Cristian Cabrera asked himself, in 2013, after a robbery in which the victim turned out to be his sister, who was defenseless.

That i show SOSAFE was born in 2014, a security app that connects neighbors with available local services –be it firefighters, police, municipal security, etc.– to collaborate and solve everyone’s problems together.

Cristian Cabrera, UC civil industrial engineer, and his partner Carlos Fernández are the creators of this solution that to date has managed to connect more than 1,500,000 people who report and inform themselves of what is happening around them. “We changed security forever, democratized it and made it collaborative,” assures Cristian. And this is how he sums up the UC connection present in the project: “In the spirit of serving and helping the community.”

Today, SOSAFE is used both by neighbors as well as companies in countries such as Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and

more. In addition, more than 30 public institutions and services are active in it, providing support to the situations reported by citizens.

“We have many ideas. We just launched our home security cameras connected to SOSAFE, which are better and cheaper than what the market offers, and soon we are going to launch a premium version of SOSAFE. We also want to expand the company internationally so that we can reach more people and that we can all live safer and more secure lives,” Cristian Cabrera states.

LESSONS

“The most difficult year was 2016, when we went through the ‘valley of death’ as a company and we had to reduce the work team by half. It is also not enough to create and innovative product, a lot of times its implementation and cultural change are also a challenge that has to be considered for it to be a success. In general, there is always going to be difficulties along the way, the important thing is to solve them and keep on moving forward,” Cristian Cabrera says.

SOSAFE connects neighbors with available local services to collaborate and solves everyone’s problems together.

/ Illustrative image of the application sections.

SOSAFE

EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT OF COMMUNAL FEES

Founded by UC engineers Antti Kulppi, Pablo Exss and David Peña, Comunidad Feliz was born in 2015. It offers a software for the administration of buildings and condominiums that allows to calculate the communal fee, generate receipts, record payments, expenditures, and charges. The project was designed for all those who are part of the community: management committee, administrators, co-owners and residents. It includes an app where you can see official announcements of the administration, pay the communal fee, reserve common spaces and receive notifications when an order arrives. Today, more than two thousand communities use it in Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Ecuador, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru and Bolivia.

“I greatly value the education I received in UC Engineering, from the ethics class to the way of making business, with a flexible curriculum. In addition, being a student and alumni generates a network that is key; my partners also studied there. The University has always been at the forefront of the development of the system in Chile, training people to be able to innovate and connecting them with others,” says Antii Kulpi, UC civil industrial engineer and CEO of ComunidadFeliz.

“I started door to door, selling the product that was born out of my personal experience with building management. The challenge of starting is hard and then comes the challenge of forming the team. We started with seed capital, we participated in different events and entrepreneurship and programs of the UC Innovation Center (Red de Mentores and Incuba UC, in 2018), telling what we were doing and we achieved more capital. Our goal today is Latin America, today we reach 400,000 families, 1,600,000 people, and for the next two years we want to be in ten thousand buildings,” he adds.

ComunidadFeliz is a software for the administration of buildings and condominiums that allows you to calculate communal fees and register payments, among other solutions.

RESPONSIBLE FREIGHT

TRANSPORTATION

CamiónGo was born in November 2017 and operates through its service GOMarket, a platform that allows carriers to connect with companies of all areas for the transfer of land cargo, saving time, resources and protecting the environment in each trip.

“The UC was very important for us. In 2018, we participated in Geek Camp (UC Innovation Center) and we were finalists, because we still didn’t have anything, it was just a presentation and we were under development. We returned the following year and we were already on the market. With that we won and we were awarded the SSAF-I fund of Corfo, which we took full advantage of. Without that process and financing, CamiónGo as it is would not exist.

Each stage has been very important, since every one of them is part of the construction and growth. I would like to highlight the formation of the team, the work to add people that allow to generate development and look for others to connect and use CamiónGO for its purpose.” Rodrigo Valdés, CEO and co-founder.

CamiónGO saves time in road freight and protects the environment.

LOGISTICS ON THE MOVE

Picktac is a logistics company dedicated to the reception of products, stock management, order preparation, delivery, reverse logistics and reports, which moves more than 5,000 parcels daily in the Metropolitan Region. It works with an inventory management and reporting software included in the monthly service, and is part of a group of companies focused on e-commerce logistics and offering a range of appropriate solutions for the best performance of different businesses.

“My time at the Universidad Católica trained me in aspects that are, in my opinion, fundamental to dare and persist in undertaking. In addition, it opened up a space of participation that allowed me to advance with the development of my personality and in the identification of my interests and eventual abilities. The challenge to organize a startup towards a sustainable company and that it does not lose flexibility and vision for permanent innovation, is a relevant milestone to achieve. This path is much more difficult in these times, since it requires a great capacity to read the changes, to find that innovative and hopefully disruptive differentiation.” Salustio Prieto, UC commercial engineer, founding director.

picktac.com

Picktac offers logistics solutions for the best performance of different businesses.

PICKTAC

MACHINERY THAT

IS ALWAYS AVAILABLE

RendaloMaq Chile is a website that seeks to make the process of renting lifting platforms and machinery easier, faster and more secure. Its algorithm connects in real time with all providers across the country, always guaranteeing the availability of any equipment to all customers and with a personalized customer service. It offers multidisciplinary professionals and with a vast experience in the machinery rental business and the development of software, also specialized in elevating platforms and work at heights.

“RendaloMaq is the pivot of an idea that originated in the course ‘Creación de Nuevas Empresas’, taught by Paula Broitman, at the UC School of Administration, which happened in the same time as Jump Chile’s applications. Undoubtedly, the most important milestone we have gone through is being accepted into Y Combinator’s S21 batch, the same accelerator as Airbnb, Dropbox and Rappi. In addition, we were the first construtech startup in Latin America in being accepted to participate in said program. Without a doubt, Y Combinator was the turning point that allowed us to scale our business to other countries.” José Tomás Fernández, Founder & Country Manager RendaloMaq.

RendaloMaq connects in real time with suppliers and allows you to guarantee the availability of different machinery to your customers.

FLEXIBLE WAREHOUSES

PalletParking is an industrial warehousing company on demand that solves in an agile and quick way the temporary warehouse needs of its customers. Cost-effective and flexible, it replaces the traditional renting of warehouses for fixed periods for a system of flexible use, paying per occupied position per day and that fits the real temporary storage needs of the company. It offers variable costs, matches customers who have needs due to excess inventories and lack of temporary space, and those who have excess operating space. It has more than 40,000 pallet positions available, among other advantages.

“My education at the Universidad Católica contributed in aspects that are, in my opinion fundamental to dare and persist in entrepreneurship. In the case of the School of Economics and Administration, where I graduated, I was motivated to innovate.” Salustio Prieto, UC commercial engineer and founding director of PalletParking.

palletparking.com

PalletParking offers industrial warehousing for daily occupancy and flexible use.

MATCHING

DEMAND AND SUPPLY

WherEX is a digital platform of supply that automatizes the processes of requirements management through to payment. Through artificial intelligence and data analytics, it connects the demand of large companies with all the potential suppliers from a network of more than 30,000 suppliers in Chile, Mexico, Peru and Colombia. The idea behind creating this venture was born in 2016, in Puerto Varas, under the name of AQMarket, that sought to provide a solution to the salmon industry in terms of transparency and competition in the bidding process. One of the founding partners, Felipe Manterola, is an alumnus of UC Engineering.

“Soon after, we noticed that this problem was affordable for any industry and, because of this, we set up WherEX, a B2B (business to business) marketplace where companies from any industry can bid on hundreds of categories and services, from office supplies, to packaging and services, to high technical specification machinery.” Felipe Manterola, founder of WherEX.

WherEX connects demand with potential suppliers from a network of more than 30,000 suppliers in Chile, Mexico, Peru and Colombia.

THE FRIENDLY PHARMACY

This eHealth pharmaceutical marketplace, that started operating in 2017, connects patients with approximately 20 pharmacies and 11 laboratories. Through a virtual store, users can search, rate, get informed and buy pharmaceutical products in a comfortable way and in easy steps. In addition, they receive personalized attention by pharmaceutical professionals in case they need it. Its purpose is to improve the adherence to pharmacological treatment by the population. Since 2022 they are also operating in Mexico and Colombia with its services of a magistral pharma handbook, patient executives and telemonitoring of diabetes and hypertension, among others.

“We participated in the Geek Camp contest of the UC Innovation Center and thanks to that we accessed a Flexible Allocation Seed Grant (SSAF), which, beyond the monetary capital, was a letter of guarantee that our idea was serious. The first attempts at programming were a disaster, but once we managed to get Pharol into production, we were faced with how to position the brand to attract our first users, who were not at all familiar with buying pharmaceuticals through the online channel. Today, we are on the path of becoming a life partner for our customers.” Felipe Fleiderman, executive director and co-founder.

Pharol helps its patients to quote and buy their pharmaceutical products in a personalized manner.

PHAROL

pharol.cl

TAILOR-MADE

Jooycar is an auto insurance and monitoring startup, created in 2014 and that reinvented the traditional way of understanding car insurance. It offers personalized insurance based on kilometers traveled and monitoring and reporting of the way the driver drives, among other services. Its system relies in telematics data to offer vehicle owners and small fleets savings on auto insurance, as well as a reduction in the cost of maintenance and spare parts. It also promotes de safety of the drivers, by helping them improve his/her habits behind the wheel. Its vision is to become the fastest growing insurtech of Latin America and that today has a presence in Peru, Chile and Mexico.

“We founders of Jooycar studied in the Universidad Católica. Between 2019 and 2020 we expanded to Peru and Mexico and multiplied the company by 10. In 2021 we launched our product in the United States, where we grew exponentially at 15% per month and became a broker in California. We were chosen the third most important global insurtech in America by Insurtech Insights and one of the 100 most innovative insurtechs worldwide by Insurtech100.” Rodrigo Labbé, CEO of Jooycar.

CONCERNED ABOUT

CAR INSURANCE GOOD EYESIGHT

Will Bloom is a digital optics, born in 2018, whose purpose is to improve the visual health of people. Its sales model allows to shorten the time to produce optical glasses and to reduce their price. This can be done in one step: entering the website, picking out the frames and glass, and uploading the prescription. It also gives de possibility to receive the previously selected frames at home and get a free eye exam at the store.

“The excellent academic background of the Universidad Católica allowed me to develop a critical and analytical thought when facing different problems. In my time at the UC, I highlight the areas more related to the creation of companies or analysis of real cases. The pandemic, for those of us who are digital first companies, gave us the opportunity to serve all those who –in our case– could not easily find an optical solution in the physical world, as it was partially closed.” Pelayo Correa, UC commercial engineer and co-founder of Will Bloom.

Jooycar offers customized car insurance and also helps to reduce maintenance costs.

willbloom.cl

Will Bloom reduces the cost and production times of optical eyewear.

WIRELESS TELEVISION

Zapping TV was born from the interest of a group of young people to be able to watch television from their cellphones. This idea was transformed into a subscription service that allows you to watch live TV via the Internet, from anywhere and without the need to use decoders, but only with a fixed or mobile connection. It currently offers three plans, with the most requested pay TV signals and has applications to be used in different devices, such as cell phones, smart TC or from the browser of any computer. Its service does not require contracts and includes features that enable interactivity, data usage and payback enhancements, such as the ability to rewind a program.

“My enterprise was born precisely in my university time, which is why I was applying the concepts that we saw in the different branches of UC Commercial Engineering directly to the business that I was building. That is why, while studying, I had a hard time learning the definitions and subjects for the tets, because I only though about how I could implement it in my business. I think there are moments where the pieces fit and the business starts to take off. In our case, it happened when the content, price and technology offering ended up being configured in a way that really made sense to many people.” Gustavo Morandé, CEO of Zapping TV.

Zapping allows you to watch live TV, via Internet, from anywhere and without decoders.

HOUM

THE PERFECT HOME

Houm has the mission to support the leasing and sale of properties in a fast, secure and online way. Its purpose is to democratize and transform this industry into something accessible, pleasant and easy, giving access to the dream home, even to those who have more difficulties. It offers services of publication of rental or sale search, calculation of property value and important information of the real estate world, among others.

“I think that the high performance environment that you live daily at the UC is key in achieving the high goals we have set ourselves in our lives, even more so in such a globalized world and where you compete with the best. The most important milestone of our company was when I realized that Houm needed to be a global organization and go to compete on equal terms with the best in the world. That is when we became convinced that we not only could, but had an obligation to make it happen.” Benjamín Labra, UC commercial engineer and co-founder & CEO of Houm.

houm.com

Houm seeks to make the buying or leasing experience in the real estate industry more friendly.

AN ONLINE ACCOUNTANT

Clay is a business administration software, which includes accounting. It offers management and collections services, financial and accounting management software, banking API and automation. All the information is in the cloud, with automatic backups that can be downloaded as spreadsheets or through the API. It includes start-up support through training, support center and an online chat.

“Both of us founders are UC alumni, which not only gave us the drive and innovation but also the collaboration of all of our University classmates, because part of our Clay team is also UC. Today, we have six years of work, perseverance, successes and failures. On February 25, we added the thousandth company to our portfolio of clients who now use our platform and have access to intelligent and efficient financial management. This fills us with pride and challenges us to keep on dreaming in digital finances.” Ignacia Jofré, UC commercial engineer, Co-founder, Chief Growth Officer, Clay Technologies.

Clay offers training and helps companies in their business management.

OLX AUTOS

QUALITY USED CARS

OLX Autos is a company of UC alumni focused on the online purchase and sale of used cars, with guaranteed security and transparency. OLX mean OnLine eXchange, but it is better known as OLX Group, a global network of marketplaces (online stores) that was born in 2006 and operates in more than 40 countries with various brands. The platform is the leader in Latin America for the purchase and sale of used cars, and is at the forefront in the markets of the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, transacting more than 130,000 cars per year.

“The greatest milestone for our organization has been the sale to a company such as OLX Group, part of Prosus, one of the largest technology investors in the world,” remembers Ignacio Detmer, UC commercial engineer and Chief Operating Officer Américas in OLX Autos, co-founder of Frontier Car Group, adquired by OLX Group, dedicated to the instant purchase of cars.

OLX Autos seeks that the purchase and sale of cars be in a safe place.

olxautos.cl

DIGITAL MANAGEMENT

OF PEOPLE

HCMFront offers a human resources software with digital products in the areas of people management, compensation, talent, surveys and work climate, rectruiment and selection, training, time clock control and HR Analytics. The company was founded in 2013, from being pioneers in Chike to a benchmark as the first integrated people management platform with solutions to cover the entire life cycle of the employee.

“The Universidad Católica plays a very important role in our beginnings, allowing us to structure ourselves to apply and be awarded a SSAF (Subsidio de Asignación Flexible) from Corfo. The most important growth milestone for our company was the incorporation of clients in Colombia, Mexico and Peru.” Nicolás A. Hanckes, Co-founder & Chief Business Development Officer.

HCMFront was the first integrated people management platform with solutions to cover the entire employee lifecycle.

TALANA

talana.com

SUPPORT FOR HEADQUARTERS

Talana is a SaaS (software as service) startup of Human Resources, founded in 2016, with a presence in Chile and Peru, which supports companies in the digitalization of their processes. They offer a set of apps for the management of human resources: compensation, attendance and shift control, communications, digital signature, requirements center, people management and organizational development. It is designed to work with human resources departments, managers and heads of large and medium-sized companies.

“The Universidad Católica has been present in our training as engineers, from the network of friends and contacts we formed in its classrooms to, at a deeper level, in the definition of the values and mission of our company. Talana has always had to comply with two unbreakable commandments: to be a company that adds value to society, in all its forms, and to be a platform where we ourselves would like to work. For us, the most important milestone has been to be able to manage the explosive growth in headcount while maintaining the company’s unique culture and style. Over the last few years, we have doubled our staff year on year, which has been a major challenge from the point of view of the people who work in it.” Pablo de la Barra, Co-founder & Board Member.

Talana supports companies in the digitalization of its processes.

TECHNOLOGY READINESS LEVEL OR TECHNOLOGY

MATURITY LEVEL. IT IS A MEASUREMENT SYSTEM, RANGING FROM 1 TO 9, USED TO ASSESS THE MATURITY LEVEL OF A PARTICULAR TECHNOLOGY.

Source: Lab to market program of the UC Office of Transfer and Development.

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

WITH THE SUPPORT

CONCEPTOSPARAENTENDERLA INNOVACIÓN

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION]

VENTURE CAPITAL

ALSO CALLED VENTURE CAPITAL FUNDS, ARE THOSE INVESTMENTS THAT ARE MADE IN STARTUPS OR COMPANIES WITH HIGH GROWTH POTENTIAL IN EARLY OR MORE ADVANCED STAGED. IT IS COMMON FOR THE VENTURE CAPITAL FUNDS TO INVEST IN TECHNOLOGY-BASED, HIGH-RISK COMPANIES, BUT ALSO WITH HIGH GROWTH POTENTIAL.

Source: Lab to market program of the UC Office of Transfer and Development.

100% DIGITAL DESIGN

Contributing to build a more sustainable world!

WITH THE SUPPORT

Innovation & Entrepreneurship_100 high-impact cases

CASES

inno va tion

CASES

entre preneur ship

inno va tion

100 HIGH-IMPACT CASES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION THE UC HALLMARK

MULTIDISCIPLINE FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

REAL WORLD SOLUTIONS

BIOTHERVAX

100 HIGH-IM

BASURAPP

NUEVAS VARIEDADES DE FRAMBUESAS

MPACT CASES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Food 29

Social Innovation 19

Education 47

Health and Wellbeing 61

Sustainability 91

Systems and Technologies 119

Digital Transformation 143

social inno va ción social inno va tion

ELEMENTAL ARCHITECTURE

ONE KEY QUESTION

THE EARTHQUAKE

MORE THAN JUST A “TECHO”1

UNSTOPPABLE FORCE

DESTÁCAME

SUPPORTING GOOD PAYERS

UC CULTURE

STEPS TO SUCCESS

INTIMATE STORIES TO TELL THE WORLD

FILMING MEMORY

IMPACT FINANCING

EXPERIENCE TO FOLLOW

HEALTHY HABITS IN THE WORK ENVIRONMENT

MOTIVATIONS

RIDING TOWARDS A MORE ACCESSIBLE WORLD

ONLINE CERTIFICATION SYSTEM

INNOVATION

CONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

ANGEL INVESTOR

RIDING TOWARDS A MORE ACCESSIBLE WORLD

ICONCEPTSTOUNDERSTAND INNOVATION

ONLINE CERTIFICATION SYSTEM

food

LONG LIFE FOR SALMON

SALMON FOR THE WORLD

TRANSFORMING THEORY

FORMATIVE ROLE

WHAT FLAVOR DO YOU PREFER YOUR PROBIOTIC?

A SYMBOL OF QUALITY AND PROFESSIONALISM

RECOVERING THE BEST PART OF THE FRUIT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

TASTIER AND HEALTHIER SNACKS

SUPPORT OF RELEVANT ACTORS

THE PATH

POWER TO FLY

HONEYS FROM CHILE AND FOR THE WORLD

THE TEACHER WHO LEAVES HER MARK /

RENOWNED SCIENTIST

CONTRIBUTION TO THE WORLD

VALUE-ADDING TECHNOLOGY /

BIOPROSPECTING

CHANGING THE CHIP MARKET

THE HELP OF HER PROFESSORS

A VIRTUAL AGRICULTURAL ADVISOR

A LOOKS TO THE FUTURE

THE PLANT-BASED FUTURE

ALLIANCE WITH A MULTINATIONAL COMPANY

BEHIND NOTCO

MORE RESEARCH

VARIEDADES DE FRAMBUESAS

DEVELOPING PERFECT RASPBERRIES

UC SUPPORT

THE SEVEN “SAINTS”

GENETIC IMPROVEMENT /