Meet Breathe, a participant of the Fall 2022 edition of the SEIF Impact Academy.

The Fall Cycle 2022 of SEIF’s Impact Academy came to an end. We are taking a moment to highlight some of the participants and how the Impact Academy helped them get impact investment ready.  

Quickly introduce Breathe and your team. 

At Breathe, we develop a portable ventilator that is specifically designed to improve emergency medical care for patients in low- and middle-income countries. Our ventilator is easy to use, affordable, robust, and battery-powered. In addition to the medical impact, we want to promote training and co-produce our ventilator locally to build capacity and strengthen local economies. We are three co-founders: Thomas Lumpe did his PhD at ETH in mechanical engineering, Leonie Korn did her PhD in Aachen in electrical and biomedical engineering, and Christos Vasileiou is a mechanical engineer with previous experience in MedTech start-ups.

What SDGs are you contributing towards and how?

We contribute to the UN SDGs 3, 4, 8, 9, 12 and 17. We want to improve emergency care for patients by developing a high-quality yet affordable ventilator. We further want to encourage knowledge transfer and build capacity by providing training to medical and technical personnel. Finally, we plan to engage local people in the product life cycle by promoting local service, maintenance, and co-production of our device. This will grow and strengthen local economies, create jobs, and eventually support healthcare systems to reduce the dependence on foreign medical devices.

Would you recommend SEIF’s Impact Academy to other startups? 

We would definitely recommend the SEIF Impact Academy to all start-ups that are interested in improving their impact strategy and align it with their business plan. The program really helped us to reflect on how we want to achieve our impact and how we could measure it better. Our coaches from UBS and Credit Suisse also brought a great, new perspective into the project by challenging our business plan from the perspective of financial experts. Together, this mix of impact and business inputs was really valuable and helped us to take the next step with our business.

What is the Impact Academy?

The Impact Academy targets impact-driven entrepreneurs to support them in getting impact-investment ready over a five-month support program. You get: 

  • coaching support targeting your special needs by two different experts from a large corporation
  • access to webinars and support to develop and establish an impact measurement framework
  • the opportunity to pitch in front of an expert community and potential impact investors