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RefFIT winner of the Venture startup competition

Willem Rischau, Alice de Baar, Iris Crassee and Nicole Ruckstuhl © Martin Rütsche

RefFIT is the winner of the Venture startup competition of 2022 in the ICT category. RefFit delivers disruptive software for the material industry to efficiently analyze spectroscopy data.

RefFIT was started as an academic project at the DQMP, University of Geneva in 2003 by Dr. Alexey Kuzmenko. It is designed for the analysis and fitting of optical spectra. The approach is model based, meaning that each experiment and material or composition of materials is captured in an analytical mathematical model, the parameters of those models are fittable using a unique analytical routine. Over the years, the software grew to include many different types of optical techniques. Since ideas of using RefFIT in a professional setting took shape, the focus of the project changed from academic purpose to solving industrial problems and help process improvement in manufacturing, mining, recycling and metal refining. Machine learning principles are now used to make the software more flexible and the analytical models are more easy to adapt to unique analysis projects, while keeping the model based analysis approach.

With RefFIT, previously complex spectroscopic analysis becomes easy, fast and accessible for unskilled users and thereby opens up many new possibilities, previously too complex and costly to attain.

The team behind RefFIT is led by Iris Crassee and consists of Nicole Ruckstuhl, Alice de Baar and Willem Rischau, advised by Alexey Kuzmenko (science), Julien Levallois (innovation) and Mark Willner (business). The project was already recognized and is currently supported by a InnoGAP grant from UNITEC.

The major recognition from both UNITEC and Venture allows the team to take the next steps: support the further development model-based analysis powered by machine learning, work on the business development and put this transformational data analysis software to the test in an industrial application.

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