Meet Venture Leader Adrian Wanner and find out how and where he puts things in perspective

20.08.2020 07:30, Isabelle Mitchell

Venture Leader Life Sciences Adrian Wanner co-founded ariadne.ai, a biotech startup focused on developing imaging-based AI-powered biomarkers that leverage imaging assays for biomedical research and drug discovery with the power of deep-learning. Learn more about Adrian’s expectations for the Boston roadshow and find out how basic research—and the many ways to fail—have prepared him for the startup world.

In November, the Venture Leaders Life Sciences 2020 will embark on their week-long roadshow to accelerate their expansion into the US market and build a business network through meetings with top-notch investors and industry leaders in Boston. To shorten the waiting time, we will introduce you to the members of the Swiss National Startup Team. We asked each entrepreneur to complete a short profile and choose four questions from a questionnaire about their personal and professional life.

Name: Adriann Wanner
Job title: CEO of ariadne.ai
Location: Buchrain
Nationality: Swiss
Graduated from: ETH Zurich
Number of employees: 7 employees and 4 founders (as of 07/2020)
First touchpoint with Venturelab: Venture Leaders Life Sciences selection process in 2020

“At ariadne.ai, we are dedicated to automated biomedical image analysis.”

How and where did you come up with the idea for your startup?
During my PhD at the Friedrich Miescher Institute (Novartis, Basel) I was facing the challenge of analyzing hundreds of gigabytes of electron microscopy data. In order to process these vast amounts of 3D image data, I teamed up with two friends, the future co-founders, to develop machine-learning-based automated image processing pipelines and software. We quickly realized that this technology can be extremely useful for other types of biomedical image data as well and that it has the potential to tremendously accelerate and improve research and diagnostics.

What do you expect from the Venture Leaders roadshow, and how will it help you achieve your vision?
Boston is the life science hotspot. While world-leading academic research institutions like Harvard or MIT are already among our customers, we hope to meet with biotech and pharma leaders and other potential customers from the industry during the Venture Leaders roadshow. In addition, we are also preparing a first financing round for Q4 2020, and we are looking forward to meeting investors and VCs who share our excitement about the potential of AI-powered image analysis for drug discovery and disease diagnostics.

How and where do you clear your mind? 
Spending a day or two ski touring or hiking in the mountains after a busy week feels like two weeks of holidays. I love the wilderness, silence, and beauty out there. Watching the stars in the clear sky from your sleeping bag in some remote valley surrounded by humongous rocks is such a humbling experience. It puts life and work into perspective like nothing else.

What is your greatest professional failure and what did you learn from it?
My roots are in basic research, where failure is your daily business. If you work hard and smart, you will, at some point, run out of options for failing and success becomes inevitable. But in order to not lose your mind over it, you must work with passion and patience. In my experience, founding a startup is not any different from that.

What is your favorite movie and why?
I like action movies like John Wick, because there—in contrast to other genres—I hardly ever feel that the book would have been better.

What is your favorite book and why?
My favorite author is Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a giant of Swiss literature. He is the only author of whom I have read all books multiple times—and I never get bored. For F.D. newbies, I recommend Justiz, and for more advanced F.D. readers, I can highly recommend his autobiographical Stoffe I-III.

Last but not least, can you show us your workspace? 


For more information and updates on ariadne.ai and the Venture Leaders Life Sciences, follow the Venture Leaders Life Sciences 2020 team with #VleadersLifeSciences on social media or subscribe to our newsletter. 
 
This year’s Venture Leaders Life Sciences roadshow to Boston is supported by EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich, Hansjörg Wyss, Kellerhals Carrard, Paul Scherrer Institut, swissnex Boston, University of Zurich, Canton Vaud, YPSOMED, and the Canton of Zurich.