Two Swiss startups pitch in Finnish ice hole
Oulo/St.Gallen - Swijn and ReewardPay are participating in Polar Bear Pitching 2025 in Oulo, Finland. ReewardPay, a broker for converting air miles into cryptocurrencies, was selected by the jury. Swijn gained an invitation winning the satellite event in Switzerland with its innovative sports bra.
(CONNECT) The Swiss textile startup Swijn and ReewardPay are among the 10 startup companies invited to Polar BearPitching 2025. During the event in the northernmost major city in the European Union, representatives of early-stage startups will present their business models to potential investors on 27 February.
Unlike other events of this kind, they will have unlimited time for their presentation. The only condition is that during the Avanto Competition they have to stand up to their chest in an ice hole, or ‘avanto’ in Finnish. This unique requirement is one of the reasons the organizers from the local location promotion organization BusinessOulu and Polar Bear Pitching are promoting this event emphasizing its global media attention. The presentations will be live-streamed, recorded and published on YouTube.
Along with six other innovative projects from Finland and the USA, the Swiss startup ReewardPay was selected from the applications by the Polar Bear pitching jury. The startup is developing a technology that can be used to convert loyalty points and air miles into cryptocurrency. Two other startups won satellite events in India and Tokyo. Swijn emerged as the winner of the third event of this kind in front of a large audience in Davos-Klosters in the Swiss canton of Graubünden on 8 February 2025.
The St.Gallen-based startup Swijn founded by Claudia Glass impressed seven investors with a sports bra that CFO and COO Chantal Schmelz presented in the Klosters Arena as the “world's first and only intelligent sports bra”. She explained that of the numerous sports bras on the market, no others have solved the main problems facing female pro athletes: lack of support, slow drying, chafing and restrictive underbust straps.
However, in collaboration with sports physiologists, textile engineers from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology and top athletes, these problems have now been solved, according to the website: ‘We are finally correcting everything that's been overlooked, unsaid and settled for in a sports bra.” ce/mm