Nordic Star Pitch Competition 1
Pitch session 1 out of 2. SME finalists will give four-minute pitches of their companies in front of the pitch competition jury and the conference audience.
NLSDays Nordic Star is a pitch competition for Nordic life science SMEs. A selection of high-potential Nordic SMEs compete for the Nordic Star Award during each NLSDays conference.
Pitching Companies
Acorai
Sweden
Acorai is a Swedish medtech company founded in 2019 and headquartered in Helsingborg, Sweden. We are developing a non-invasive bedside platform to personalize heart failure care through cardiac and pulmonary pressure sensing. Our mission is to bring actionable hemodynamic insights, traditionally available only through invasive right heart catheterization, to routine emergency, inpatient and post-discharge workflows. Acorai targets a $1.1B US / $3B+ global point-of-care heart failure market. The company has 7 FTEs and 15 part-time consultants, supported by clinical leaders in heart failure and hemodynamics and advisors with experience from FDA, global clinical studies, medtech commercialization, GE Healthcare, Philips, Medtronic, Getinge and NAMSA.
Cacto Health
Denmark
Cacto Health is a Danish MedTech startup developing MyLymphCare — the first home-based device for early detection of lymphedema in breast cancer survivors. Founded in 2022 by a multidisciplinary team from the Biomedical Design Novo Nordisk Foundation Fellowship, we combine deep clinical insight, hardware engineering, and regulatory expertise.
We have CE-marked hardware, a European patent with all 15 claims confirmed novel and inventive by the EPO, and active clinical pilots at major medical centers in Denmark and Sweden. Our cost-of-illness collaboration with Barmer Health Insurance Germany — documenting €58K per chronic lymphedema patient — provides an unusually strong health economic foundation for reimbursement at an early stage.
We have raised ~€850K from 10+ sources and are currently raising a €1M seed round ahead of MDR CE marking and commercial launch in 2027. Beyond breast cancer, our core bioimpedance platform has expansion potential into leg lymphedema, heart failure and dialysis monitoring — addressing a combined multi-billion euro market.
Dianovo
Sweden
Dianovo AB is a Swedish deep-tech in vitro diagnostics company based at Ideon Science Park in Lund. It was incorporated in June 2025 and is pre-revenue at TRL 2.
The product: Dianovo is developing CENTiV, a continuous roll-to-roll, cellulose-based lateral flow diagnostic platform. It replaces single-use plastic cassettes with a sealed roll of 100 tests, read by a reusable near-infrared optical reader. A passive privacy layer printed into the strip lets each result fade from view after the patient reads it, supporting stigmatized testing such as HIV.
The market: The lead indication is donor-blood screening for HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and syphilis. This is an entry segment of about EUR 230 million inside a EUR 9.4 billion global lateral-flow market growing at about 7 percent per year.
Because the reader and roll serve any analyte, the same platform extends to further infectious-disease panels and adjacent markets without new hardware.
Genomill Health
Finland
Genomill Health Oy is a precision medicine platform company founded in 2016 in Turku, Finland. Our patented core technology, Geno1, transforms the most complex and costly step in molecular testing, sequencing library preparation, from a day-long, specialist-dependent process into a simple workflow any clinic can run: from multi-day to single-day, at a fraction of the cost, while detecting disease markers at the lowest clinically relevant levels.
Geno1 runs on all major sequencing platforms and is backed by 19 granted patents and peer-reviewed clinical validation. We operate an out-licensing model: diagnostics and sequencing companies build and sell Geno1-powered tests across cancer care (treatment selection, therapy monitoring, MRD), reproductive/genetic testing and infectious disease, while Genomill earns upfront fees, development milestones and stacked royalties.
Our first co-development partnership, with the global leader in genetic testing, was signed in Q1 2026, with 10+ further licensees in discussions. The team draws on experience from MIT, Foundation Medicine, Roche and AstraZeneca. We are currently raising a €10M Series A.
NaDeNo
Norway
NaDeNo is a Norwegian SINTEF spin-off and close-to-clinic biotech redefining delivery of hard-to-deliver drugs. Our patented PACA nanoparticle platform enables targeted, sustained delivery of hydrophobic molecules without chemical modification, with lead asset PACAB-002 moving toward Phase I in ovarian cancer and broad platform potential for pharma partnerships.
Rayca Precision
Finland
Rayca Precision is a scalable pharma intelligence layer for therapeutic development. We give pharma the institutional memory for molecular design it has never had.
Our engine is an operating layer that develops its own computational methods. From the available data it sets up the simulation and the generative screening workflow. That work normally needs scarce expert computational chemists.
It pairs generative AI with physics-based simulation. It models how a protein moves to find the cryptic pockets static structures miss. Then it generates and screens selective molecules against them.
Every decision is checked against the literature, the experimental data, and an independent calculation, then captured with full lineage. Every result and lab readout compounds into intelligence the next program inherits.
The engine carries one of the deepest stacks in AI drug discovery. Its registry holds more than 300 models, simulation engines, curated analytical workflows, and database integrations. It works across small molecules, peptides, antibodies, nanobodies, and degraders in oncology, immuno-oncology, and rare disease.
We keep the therapeutic upside and own assets through co-discovery and co-development. Molecules from the engine already show functional, wet-lab-confirmed activity in independent partner labs. We have programs with ASAKE, Stanford Medicine, dPTx, and signing with University of New Mexico.
Respiratorius
Sweden
Respiratorius AB (publ) develops pharmaceutical candidates aimed at treating aggressive lymphoma, with the objective of commercialising or out-licensing its assets.
The company’s lead programme focuses on a pretreatment designed to potentiate the effects of the current standard of care for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma — the most prevalent form of aggressive lymphoma.
Respiratorius was established in 1999 as a spin-out from Lund University and has been listed on the Spotlight Stock Market since 2012.