Founders, Funders, Futures: Rising at Start Summit 2026

Video episode!

Start Summit 2026, an event organized by students in Switzerland. Featuring an elevator and a challenge every entrepreneur knows well: explain a complex idea in 60 seconds without losing what truly matters.

From Start Summit 2026 in St. Gallen, we recorded an Intangiblia Flash episode capturing the energy of a place where investors, founders, and inventors come together to accelerate, expand, and turn real technology into reality.

The best founders don’t treat intellectual property like paperwork, they treat it like strategy. I walk around the Start Summit, talking about patents, trademarks, open-source licensing, and the real reason IP matters to customers and investors. If you’re building a startup and wondering what “defensible” actually means, these short interviews make it concrete in minutes.

We talk about a dual approach that many deep tech companies overlook: patent the core hardware innovation while keeping software open source under a permissive license to drive adoption and let customers go deep without fear of IP constraints. Then we jump into consumer and assistive tech, including a cat health-monitoring station that measures intake, temperature, and more, plus a smartwatch built for people with cognitive impairments that uses symbols, schedules, and voice prompts. It’s a reminder that product design, trust, and usability can be as important to protect as the underlying tech.

An experienced investor and company builder shares why IP is a game-changer in biotech, medtech, semiconductors, and industrial technology, especially when partnerships or acquisitions are the likely path to scale. We also touch on common founder pitfalls, like filing too early, and why a strong IP portfolio is something you reinforce over time, not a snapshot you frame once.

If you want more founder field notes like this, subscribe, share the episode with a builder friend, and leave a review with the smartest IP lesson you’ve learned so far. Video episode!

Check out "Protection for the Inventive Mind" – available now on Amazon in print and Kindle formats.

The views and opinions expressed (by the host and guest(s)) in this podcast are strictly their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the entities with which they may be affiliated. This podcast should in no way be construed as promoting or criticizing any particular government policy, institutional position, private interest or commercial entity. Any content provided is for informational and educational purposes only.

Transcript

Welcome To Start Summit

SPEAKER_06 0:00

Hello, my name is Edisa Caminero. I'm the host of Intangibilia and welcome to this flash episode on the Start Summit. Um I've been interviewing people all around the summit to talk about intellectual property technology and how it can impact the different businesses and entrepreneurships. I hope you enjoyed this episode and let's meet all these amazing founders, entrepreneurs, investors, and people who are making a change in the world.

SPEAKER_03 0:35

Hi, I'm Henry Gonzalez. I am the co-founder and CEO of Screencloud. So at Screencloud we build brain-inspired microchips on supercomputers for AI work. And the IP strategy is very important for a company like us, like a deep tech company in particular. So we have a dual strategy, one for hardware and one for software. So actually, our hardware strategy is around patents. So we have some strategic patents that protect the strategy all the way from the microchip to the supercomputer level. And around software, actually, we are a little bit more softer in software because we want to incentivate people to use our infrastructure. So we have a fully open source but permissible open source approach with software with a permissible license like Apache V2. So this allows customers to basically dig very deep into our infrastructure without any IP constraints.

SPEAKER_06 1:27

And that's remarkable. So you you make a combination with being protected but also staying open for exactly. Great. And how IP has impacted your business.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Well, it's uh it's very important in this specific field because of course when we are told when you're talking to investors and even customers, they do want to know that what you have is special and that what you have is protected, so that it's not um, especially from a customer perspective, they want to know that your architectures, if they are committing to your architecture, something unique, that they can develop also tools for your own architecture. So you need to ensure that it's a unique uh architecture and topology, it's protected, and from an investor perspective, the same thing, right? So they want to bet on an infrastructure play that is be able to maintain their technology in a defensible way.

SPEAKER_04 2:26

My name is Angelica, I'm one of the co-founders of AI Tales. Yes, so it's actually from a personal experience. I had two cats myself. I didn't throw that one of my cats was sick, I just recognized it and she was losing a lot of weight, but then it was already too late, and this inspired me to create a solution to keep the cats healthy and happy for a long time.

SPEAKER_06 2:48

Amazing. And how how in the bipathy has impacted your business?

SPEAKER_04 2:52

In our opinion, IP is something really important, especially for young business, um, to make sure that the product and the business is safe, is secured, and we can recommend it to any startup or every young business to go the steps to secure the IP and to make it happen that you can try for a long time. Perfect.

SPEAKER_06 3:15

Can you show us uh how it works?

SPEAKER_04 3:17

Yes, of course. So as soon as the cat goes to the station, it activates first the cat's fountain because cats can natural more water when the water is moving. They can fent this with the whiskers and they think it has such bacteria inside. So this is an easy way to promote the natural drinking habits. We measure the amount of water and foods the cat eats and drinks. We also measure the temperature of the cat as well. And here we have a little camera which we do a facial analysis with. With that, we can see if the cat is in pain and guess how much pain. This data is directly displayed in the app, so you have your own smartwatch for your cat.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

Hi, I'm Alex from Inclusives, and we're building a smartwatch for people with cognitive impairments. So this is our watch. Uh, it's optimized for people with autism, ADHD, uh, intellectual disabilities, and we help them understand uh a little bit more about their daily schedules, we visualize their events uh with sectors and symbols, and we give interactive uh voice output from the watch, so it sounds like it's 12 o'clock now, it's time for lunch. So this was uh has a research background from our university. So we started like over three years ago with my co-founder's brother who has epilepsy um and tried to solve some problems for him, realized it works, and uh yeah, based on our research, then founded the company. So uh from early on, we trademarked our design actually because the software patent, of course, is always a little bit difficult. So, what we do now is we have this uh watch face we have here with the sectors and the symbols, the general structure and design of it is trademarked as a huge um design.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

And uh after a few years, uh decided to leave the academic career, started my first company in drug development uh in oncology, and I've never stopped. I mean, I've started multiple other companies uh still uh in the domain of uh drug development, uh biomedical devices, uh also I invested in digital uh uh health and genomics. So uh and we professionally have been investing in uh deep tech uh and biotech with a colleague uh since 2012. Well, IP for us is fundamental, in a sense that I have, as I said, a very strong background in biomedical sciences, and my colleague has a also very strong colleague uh background in uh semiconductor and uh uh microelectronics. So in both sectors where we are active, um IP is a game changer. Uh, very often uh in uh biotech, uh the uh objective of a company is to engage uh with a partnership or an acquisition with a pharmaceutical company that can actually uh then complete uh uh the the clinical trials leading to uh to registration. Uh and medical devices sometimes with companies now that have approved products uh even in the United States, uh, but for commercial distribution, uh for uh co-development agreements, um, larger companies are always involved. And larger companies need to know that if they purchase you or if they do a deal with you, that you can protect uh uh the uh uh ideas and products. So uh having a strong IP position, both in uh life science, biotech, med tech, or in deep tech, uh industrial technologies, is essential to be able to create value.

SPEAKER_06 6:52

And what would you advise to um young founders or startups?

SPEAKER_01 6:58

I do that all the time because I'm a company builder uh and uh we have uh essentially started uh been involved in starting more than 20 companies in the last 10 years. I have these discussions about IP from the very beginning. So very often they're scared because uh they come from academia where intellectual property is not teached or not uh uh they're not exposed. And now with uh technology uh transfer offices, the discussion starts a little bit more to be present, uh, but I see a lot a lack in our academic uh uh uh background uh and how to explain uh uh the relevance of IP because very often IP is seen as antagonistic to research, and which is not the case. It's just a matter of education. So I do a lot of education uh with our CEOs and then founders, and I'm um always pushing every day, every time I meet with them uh to consider the angle of intellectual property. Uh very often, sometimes companies come with uh patents that have been filed too early, uh, which is also a dramatic problem. So I need to make sure I understand the philosophy behind it. So it is a matter of again education. Um, and then very often uh I'm involved in uh drafting uh of uh uh uh the patents, or most likely we very often actually because we rely on external experts that do that, on the strategy development. So um, and also from the investment side, when we do syndication uh with investors, um very often investors rely on our expertise and intellectual property. So they ask us uh to evaluate the IP solidity, or and I keep responding that you know a snapshot of IP on a particular time means very little. One needs to see this uh longitudinally with time, because in reality IP is evolving every time, and everything being involved in filing more than 40 patents, and having involved in licensing patents, uh uh uh selling products with IP protection, uh litigating patents as well to uh the highest degree of the Supreme Court of Delaware. Uh, I know how complex the situation is. So even issue patents can be contested, and I contested in one uh against issue patents. On the other side, one needs to really have a strategy to reinforce the entire uh IP uh portfolio because that's a critical component of a company.

SPEAKER_07 9:25

I'm Benedict Narcy, I'm from Alone, the founder of Alone, and we're hungry and a company developing a manufacturing technology for complex robotic bodies. The way we do this is that basically we took the technology that we use in the industry to create ropes, so very simple product, very complex piece of technology, and created a way to uh produce in a single straightforward process all the connective tissues if you go by a biomechanical analogy for a robotic body. What that means is that instead of having hundreds of components, like framework, uh bearings, pins, screws, whatever, and having to assemble them manually through a huge supply chain automation line, we have a single platform rooted in textile technology for producing various complexities of robotic buttons.

SPEAKER_06 10:08

And how do you use intellectual property to protect your technology?

SPEAKER_07 10:12

Since we are a hardware-focused company, we definitely focus both in terms of what we can do with the technology and how technology actually works on patenting and on making sure that we are on par with whatever we build before we get. It's a cycle of patenting before you go to the market, etc. And also protecting IP, where it's it's more in the know-how domain and about how we use technology and what what is your specific expertise in that field, which is what enables us to work.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Hello, how are you? I'm Juan Castini, co-founder of Biocle. Biocle is a startup of biotechnology in Argentina. What we have a platform of vesicles extra-cellular bacterial to create complex bioactives directly in the cellular.

SPEAKER_06 10:54

And what inspiration is your empreending?

SPEAKER_00 11:03

This was what we impulsed to create Biocle, because we know that there are many supplement and molecules bioactives with a bunch of potential.

SPEAKER_06 11:18

And how used the intellectual empreending? And what type of property intellectual are we using?

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Basically, what we are doing is property of the method, and we're going to develop that component of our platform that we have. But the idea is to have a paraguay that cover the core of our technology and that component.

SPEAKER_06 11:58

Perfect. And what has been the most rate for us?

SPEAKER_00 12:03

But definitively the most rate is to traduce the potential that has our science for that person and perceiving the benefits. This is complicated because it's very abstract. But we're that when we have our product in the market, these benefits are going to build automatically. And the consequence that has been that we went to them what we are doing, much I can be the first to provide this product. Inclusive the buttirato, which is our supplement, is related with Alzheimer's and autism. So all these things that we can have an impact positive in how the people come and how the people think is something that really gratificates, because we think.

SPEAKER_06 13:37

Perfecto. And what has been your exit after?

SPEAKER_05 13:51

Hello, I'm Fernanda from Sao Paulo in Brazil. We're currently here at Start Summit in the Start Fellowship Program, and I'm creating one of the first marketplaces of experiences in Brazil right now. We connect bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and avens with people that live in big cities because they struggle to find unique experiences to hang out at the weekends, and also local businesses as bars and restaurants struggle to find the right audience for them. So we connect the both parts and we uh deal with a marketplace. So we take a commission of everything that is built inside our platform. So being here at Switzerland and has been a great opportunity to know more about the uh European ecosystem, to learn with my other fellows that are also from Latin America and Africa, and know uh be in the right place to reach the tendencies of technology, mainly in this event here at Star Summit. Um, something that inspired me to start is because like there are not a lot of women in tech in general, not only in Brazil, but at the world. And I always be passionate about technology since I was a kid. So having my startup, being selected for the program, it's truly an honor. And I think there is so important to have initiatives like the Start Fellowship program that give us the equal opportunities both for um young entrepreneurs from another country, and yeah, it's it's truly an honor to be part of this program, being here in Switzerland, and also to speak in the podcast.

SPEAKER_06 15:19

Thank you. And what inspiring you to create uh your company?

SPEAKER_05 15:24

Um yeah, y'all started with my problem. I was really struggling to find new places um to go with my friends at weekends, and then I realized that we don't have an app, not a global app or not a local app that actually helped us to discover the best options. But in the middle of the way, when I started to develop it, I realized that there was also a big problem in the side of the owners of bars and restaurants, because like many of them close their establishments with less than one year of operation, and that's because they don't know how to do a properly marketing and how to reach the old audience and also how to communicate with the new generation that chooses where to go buy their phones. So um right now I'm passionate about their problem too. So my main goal today is like to bring these people to actually book their tables, consume at the restaurant, and support the local economy.

SPEAKER_06 16:21

Thank you so much for your time.