Ventures

UpCircle Technology AG

Paper mills buy large amounts of paper for recycling, and its quality is still mostly checked by eye. At UpCircle we use cameras and AI to measure what is actually in every delivery, so mills can rate their suppliers and run their processes based on data. Our systems run in paper mills in Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.

The idea started in 2019 at ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab, and we founded UpCircle Technology AG in 2024. My co-founders are Marco Hutter, Adrian Ensmenger, Fidel Esquivel and Dario Strübin. We are currently supported by an Innosuisse innovation project.

Autonomous River Cleanup

A student project at ETH Zurich to get waste out of rivers. I was technical lead and systems engineer for the clean-up vessel Livia, which we ran on the Limmat in Zurich from June to August 2021. Together we raised more than CHF 600k in donations. The team also built a camera system that counts floating waste and a sorting station with robot arms in a shipping container. UpCircle started from this work.

Kolvenbach Engineering

My own small engineering company, set up in 2016 for mechatronics, prototyping and technical advice on hardware projects. Projects included the project management of an ESA rover field test on Tenerife and the retrofit of the MICROS air-bearing satellite simulator.