Nium founder Alberto Noronha shown during Tuesday's pitching event at Web Summit 2019 in Lisbon, Portgual Delano

Nium founder Alberto Noronha shown during Tuesday's pitching event at Web Summit 2019 in Lisbon, Portgual Delano

During the pitch, Nium’s founder Alberto Noronha presented his personalised, nutritional platform to an audience that included not only judges from eToro, Coelius Capitak, Denons Venture Tech and more, but also to a number of Nium supporters, judging from the cheers that greeted his appearance on stage. 

A spinoff of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine through the University of Luxembourg, Nium is bidding on preventing and treating diet-related disease through its technology and offers a wide range of applications, providing research support to pharma and biotech, analysing gut-microbome for nutrition companies and personalized nutrition for healthcare providers. 

Nium, incorporated in May 2019, has already received a €400,000 grant, and was one of the winners of the October 2019 Fit4Start competition. Noronha anticipates a revenue this year of €85,000.  The startup is already working with Ferrero and also developing applications for type 2 diabetes management. It’s backed by a high-quality scientific advisory board.

Following his pitch, judges were mainly curious about proprietary testing, data gathering and pricing strategy. In the latter case, Noronha says it would be “on top of dietician consultation, but of course in some countries these are already reimbused so we’re seeing how to design a nice pricing strategy”. He also envisions two steps, with validation of methodology, selling out of pocket for one or two years, or as treatment for clinical trials. 

Presenting alongside Nium were a number of other convincing startups, including Runnr, Goodbag, MaaStran, Raison.ai and AlphaVoice. The judges selected as the winner Austrian startup Goodbag, which developed a smart reusable shopping bag which can be scanned in a contactless way to reward customers for using it--allowing them to plant trees, collect plastic waste and so on, by shopping at participating retailers.