Seven months on: how Voltiris is building on its Helbling Venture Challenge success

When Voltiris won the Helbling Venture Challenge 2025, the Swiss climate-tech startup impressed the jury with its innovative approach to greenhouse agriculture. By intelligently harnessing different parts of the light spectrum, Voltiris enables greenhouses to produce both food and solar energy simultaneously, helping growers improve sustainability, resilience and resource efficiency.

Seven months later, the company continues to build momentum, demonstrating how the right combination of innovation, expertise and collaboration can help promising technologies scale their impact.

Winning the Helbling Venture Challenge

The Helbling Venture Challenge supports ambitious startups tackling major technological challenges. Beyond recognition, the winning company receives hands-on product development support from Helbling Technik’s multidisciplinary team of engineers, designers and innovation experts.
For Voltiris, the challenge came at an important stage of growth. While the company already had a strong technological foundation, the collaboration created an opportunity to step back from day-to-day operations and focus on key strategic and development priorities.

Commenting on the value of the challenge, Nicolas Weber, CEO & Co-Founder of Voltiris said, “Helbling Technik’s engineering expertise came at a pivotal moment, as we move from a proven technology toward industrial-scale deployment. Working alongside their multidisciplinary team gave us access to real product development and industrialisation know-how. This helped us pressure-test our design choices, sharpen our development roadmap, and build confidence in how we scale our technology toward production. It’s exactly the kind of hands-on technical partnership that helps a hardware startup turn a promising innovation into a robust, scalable product.”

Creating strategic clarity for growth

Through workshops, ideation sessions and ongoing exchanges, Voltiris worked closely with Helbling’s team to explore new concepts, validate opportunities and further refine its roadmap. The structured approach helped align technology development even more closely with evolving market needs, while also creating space to reflect on topics such as scalability, market positioning and long-term product evolution.

The collaboration highlights how partnerships between startups and experienced innovation teams can go beyond accelerating technology development. They can also provide strategic clarity, strengthen resilience and help companies navigate the challenges that come with growth.

Reflecting on the collaboration, Nicolas Schärer, Managing Director and Partner at Helbling Technik highlighted the qualities that made Voltiris stand out: “Voltiris has both a compelling vision and a team with the determination to turn that vision into reality. Throughout the collaboration, we were impressed by their openness to challenge assumptions, explore new perspectives and continuously refine their approach. That’s exactly the kind of mindset that helps innovation move from promising technology to real-world impact.”

Looking ahead to the 2026 challenge

While Voltiris is building on the momentum created by its 2025 win, the next generation of Helbling Venture Challenge participants is already underway.

This year’s edition focuses on Physical AI – intelligent systems that can perceive, understand and act in the physical world. From robotics and autonomous systems to smart industrial technologies, the challenge highlights startups working at the intersection of AI, engineering and real-world impact.

The Top 10 startups for the Helbling Venture Challenge 2026 have now been selected. Over the coming months, the teams will work closely with Helbling experts as they refine their technologies and prepare for the final pitch event in September.

Find out which startups made the list here

Get the latest Swiss food innovation news, events and jobs in your inbox.

Latest News