Inside Slush 100: Diffraqtion Wins It All, Plus the Finals and Standout Founders
A full recap of the Slush 100 finals including the winner, the runner ups, and the standout startups that shaped Slush 2025 and showed where global tech is headed next.
Slush 2025 was something else.
It was my first time attending, and nothing prepares you for that walk down the entrance staircase… lights overhead… the entire place glowing like a scene out of TRON. The vibe is part nightclub, part future lab, and completely designed for what Slush does best… help people meet, collaborate, and build.
The theme this year was Ground State, a nod to the new reality founders are navigating. AI, automation, and synthetic biology are changing how companies are created, and Slush brings the global ecosystem together to make sense of it. With more than 6,000 startups and over 3,000 investors on site, the energy was intense but surprisingly calm—plenty of meeting space, real seating everywhere, and yes… free food that kept everyone moving.
Then there is Slush 100, one of the most competitive early-stage pitch competitions in the world. The winner receives a one-million-euro investment from General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures… two firms with a long track record of backing category-defining companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Flix, and Auto1.
This year’s finalists were exceptional. Technical founders, real traction, clear problem statements… the kind of teams you expect to see leading new categories. Out of thousands of applicants, only three reached the final round. Each represented a different frontier and a different kind of ambition.
Below is a closer look at the winner and the two runner-ups — and why they stood out.
You’ll also find a curated list of standout startups from our PopUp interviews across the two days at Slush.
Slush 100 2025 Winner & Finalists
Slush 100 this year was stacked. Technical founders, hard science, and category-shifting ideas everywhere you turned. From the first pitch to the final three, the bar kept rising. Out of thousands of applicants, only three teams made it through to the last round — each with a distinct view of the future and the traction to back it. Here’s the winner and the two runner-ups who defined the energy of the competition.
UpNext PopUp Interviews with the Finalists
Winner of Slush 100
Diffraqtion — Johannes Galatsanos
Pitch: Diffraqtion has developed a quantum-enhanced imaging system that sees far beyond the diffraction limit. Their proprietary camera technology unlocks satellite-level resolution using dramatically smaller, cheaper hardware. It is poised to make real-time, persistent Earth observation economically viable at a global scale.
PopUp Insights: Johannes breaks down a wildly complex technology with uncommon clarity. The dual-use demand is real — defense, intelligence, energy, agriculture, and supply-chain operators all want higher-fidelity visibility without the $100M price tag of legacy systems.
Traction: Backed by pre-seed and government R&D grants, with research contracts totaling €5M+ and multiple U.S. and EU defense agencies involved in early testing. Ground systems are scheduled to deploy in 2026, with the first space mission slated for 2028.
Why they placed: A scientifically elite team with an unmistakably category-creating technology. The pitch balanced ambition with credibility — a rare combination in frontier space tech.
Runnerup
Kinetic — Lucas Boller
Pitch: Kinetic transforms email into an interactive surface where users take action directly inside the message — from checkout to authentication to workflow approval. No redirects, no landing pages, no friction.
PopUp Insights: Email hasn’t meaningfully evolved in 50 years. Lucas is attacking one of the most entrenched communication standards with deep technical execution. The integrations, rendering engine, and security layers required to do this safely make the defensibility clear.
Traction: Fast-growing early adoption across SaaS and e-commerce, with B2B pilots showing significant uplift in conversion and user engagement, paying customers in multiple markets.
Why they placed: A breakthrough in a ubiquitous channel. Kinetic feels like the start of a new interaction layer—and investors recognized the inevitability of the category.
Runnerup
Parsewise — Max Hofer
Pitch: Parsewise turns large, messy document packages into structured, decision-ready datasets. Underwriting, investment, and procurement teams use it to collapse days of document review into minutes.
PopUp Insights: Max understands the pain deeply — large financial and industrial transactions still hinge on PDFs, spreadsheets, and inconsistent templates. Parsewise’s proprietary extraction engine and ontology mapping make the product sticky and hard to replicate.
Traction: Live revenue, daily usage inside financial institutions, and strong retention. Early signals show the product becoming embedded infrastructure rather than optional tooling.
Why they placed: Rock-solid execution, clear commercial traction, and a category with massive enterprise pull. Parsewise already feels like a must-have for teams dealing with document overload.
Slush 100 Standout Startups
And while the finalists anchored the stage, the depth of talent across this year’s Slush 100 program was impressive. So many founders came in with clarity, conviction, and real progress.
Here are the ones that stood out to me — whether through the problem they’re solving, the way they pitched, or the momentum they’re building.
4QT — Marc Vetter
Pitch: Hybrid electric drivetrains for heavy construction equipment that cut emissions while increasing power and profitability.
PopUp Insights: Construction operates on thin margins and massive emissions. Marc’s clarity is sharp: adoption only happens when sustainability meets or beats diesel economics. 4QT’s hybrid system delivers that balance. With early revenue, major LOIs, and OEM partnerships forming, they’ve moved fast from prototype to paid deployments.
What stood out: Deep founder market insight and a realistic, economically aligned climate solution.
Alteva — Aiko Bernehed
Pitch: Ultralight lithium sulfur batteries built for electric aviation and long-distance trucking with no cobalt, nickel, or graphite.
PopUp Insights: Aiko attacks battery weight and supply chain risk head-on. Their lithium-sulfur chemistry unlocks dramatically lighter batteries while removing dependence on China’s 97% controlled supply chain. Fifteen years of R&D show in the defensibility.
What stood out: A technically elite founder solving a global bottleneck with real prototypes and early customer demand.
Everday — Estefanía Hernández
Pitch: An intelligence layer that unifies company data to reveal real human capability and internal mobility potential.
PopUp Insights: Companies sit on scattered people data across HR, ATS, JIRA, and more. Everday unifies it into one source of truth, giving leaders visibility into who can grow, lead, or shift roles without guesswork.
What stood out: Clear founder conviction, strong early customers in regulated industries, and a vision anchored in capability over titles.
Merqury Cybersecurity — André Xuereb
Pitch: A technology-agnostic security layer that brings quantum-secure communication to real-world infrastructure.
PopUp Insights: As global attackers stockpile encrypted data, Merqury bridges the gap between quantum communication hardware and enterprise usability. Already deploying a national-scale network in Malta.
What stood out: Strong scientific leadership, deep ecosystem partnerships, and crucial timing in the quantum era.
Normain — Sara Lindfors
Pitch: Instructional AI that turns document chaos into structured insights for consultants, risk teams, and compliance professionals.
PopUp Insights: Built for teams who live inside documents. Their custom AI engine and workflow UI enable precision extraction and 80 percent time savings.
What stood out: A hardened product shaped by real edge cases and a founder who understands knowledge work deeply.
Rayca Precision — Pouya Behrouzi
Pitch: AI-driven therapeutic discovery for immuno-oncology and rare diseases using physics-based simulations and multimodal compound design.
PopUp Insights: Rayca designs millions of candidates across multiple drug modalities and validates them through automated lab workflows, tightening the AI-lab feedback loop.
What stood out: A founder fluent in both science and business with validated early compounds.
Rebaba — Paula Runsten
Pitch: Stationary energy storage built from second-life EV batteries with an agnostic control platform that integrates 40-plus battery types.
PopUp Insights: The world is overflowing with retired EV batteries that still retain significant capacity. Rebaba turns them into green, affordable grid storage.
What stood out: Real deployments, paying customers, and a circular model that scales.
Red Cable Robots — Roland Baumann
Pitch: Large-scale cable-driven robots that deliver flexible, cost-efficient automation across warehouses and industrial environments.
PopUp Insights: Traditional robot arms are limited by reach, cost, and rigidity. Cable robots flip the equation by enabling massive workspaces and lower deployment costs.
What stood out: Two decades of research culminating in commercial-ready robotics with major scalability.
SEATOM Technologies — Roope Marttila
Pitch: Nuclear propulsion systems engineered to decarbonize global shipping.
PopUp Insights: With fuel regulations tightening and synthetic fuels proving too expensive, nuclear is emerging as the only viable zero-emission path for large vessels.
What stood out: A world-class team with real nuclear maritime experience and a pragmatic, regulation-aligned strategy.
Solace Care — Valtteri Korkiakosk
Pitch: An AI-supported end-of-life planning and support platform for individuals, families, and insurers.
PopUp Insights: Solace operates in an emotionally heavy, underserved category. Their platform modernizes legacy workflows and helps insurers offer meaningful value.
What stood out: Rare mission clarity with strong early traction and a category ready for reinvention.
Universal Atmosphere Processing — Brendan Conroy
Pitch: Atmospheric processors that extract noble gases directly from air for semiconductors, fusion, and advanced manufacturing.
PopUp Insights: UAP makes previously impractical gas capture commercially viable. Early partnerships include CERN and a global engineering group.
What stood out: A true hard tech moonshot with credible partners and a clear industrial wedge.
Omaia — Nina Larsen
Pitch: A digital health solution co-created with midwives and psychologists that reduces pregnancy-related anxiety through personalized programs.
PopUp Insights: One in four pregnancies involves clinically meaningful anxiety. Omaia extends care beyond the clinical system with an accessible, 24/7-guided program.
What stood out: A mission-driven founder building a clinically grounded, scalable mental health solution.
Slush 2025 in under a minute
Here’s a quick walk of the floor — the lights, the energy, the movement — everything that makes Slush feel more like a futuristic nightclub than a conference. If you’ve never been, this is the closest you’ll get without stepping into the TRON tunnel yourself.
Slush 2025 in under a minute
