Winning EQT Impact Challenge Gave Medtech Maker Confidence to Go Global

Louis Sze spends a lot of time explaining to people what exactly his company does. In simple terms, it powers augmented reality glasses for surgeons to improve accuracy on the operating table. But the product isn’t easily categorized; it’s not quite a surgical robot, nor is it a standard medical device. It’s so specialized that, in the early days, the company – founded in Hong Kong in 2021 – faced an uphill battle convincing investors and hospitals that the technology had a big enough market.

Then, in July 2025, EQT chose Syngular as the winner of its Impact Challenge. The €100,000 ($117,000) prize was significant, but for Sze, something else shifted. “There was a really big boost to our confidence,” he says. For the first time, a major institution had put its name behind his vision. Syngular beat out hundreds of other applicants working across healthcare, energy, biotechnology and carbon capture – all billed as mission-driven businesses, underpinned by scalable, technical innovation.

“We hope that winning the EQT Impact Challenge becomes a genuine inflexion point – we want the winners to walk away with a network, a signal, and a degree of confidence that changes how they operate,” says Queenie Wong, a Managing Director at EQT Asia Growth in Hong Kong. “The best outcome is that a company looks back a few years later and points to this as the moment things started to move.”

So far, so good; since July, Syngular has already grown its team from six to 10 people. It’s also expanding globally via institutions in Europe.

As EQT launches the 2026 Impact Challenge in Hong Kong, Sze reflects on what winning last year’s €100,000 award from EQT Foundation and becoming an EQT portfolio company has meant for Syngular.

Q: What was your immediate reaction to winning the EQT Impact Challenge?

Louis Sze: It was an amazing experience. We hadn’t won any championship-level award before this, so there was a really big boost to our confidence.

We’re in a very niche space. For context, Syngular creates high-fidelity, patient-specific models in under 30 minutes, which are then viewed through a mixed-reality headset. Early data shows a promising reduction in surgical errors, having been used in more than 80 real patient cases across pilots. This is completely novel to a lot of people, so EQT’s backing made it easier for us to convince investors and users.

Q: Did winning help you secure new interest from other investors?

Louis Sze: Yes, we’re now closing a new funding round. EQT jumping in strengthened that process and helped us close this seed round. We’re about 80 percent done with due diligence.

Being an EQT Foundation portfolio company definitely helps with investors outside Hong Kong, like in the U.S. and Europe. That name recognition gives you a lot of help.

Q: How did the prize money help practically?

Louis Sze: The €100,000 was just the start. As a startup backed by the City University of Hong Kong, I could actually apply for one-to-one matching from the Hong Kong government. So that became double – €200,000 in total. That’s good money. We’re quite well covered for most of the year.

Q: Have there been other benefits beyond the investment?

Louis Sze: Yes. For instance, one of the EQT partners in Spain, who is also the chancellor of a university, got interested when they heard about us. They connected us to a Spanish university, and they’re now interested in our platform for healthcare training around anatomy. Education could be a good low-hanging fruit for us, born directly from the EQT link.

We also have quarterly reviews with the EQT Asia Growth team in Hong Kong, who are watching our progress and check in with us.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced since winning?

Louis Sze: The entire market got shuffled. We started with Microsoft HoloLens, which all our competitors were using too, but Microsoft killed the product. So everybody had to race to a second platform.

It’s actually good for us as a latecomer. The earlier market leaders struggled because they’d already spent most of their funds on the first headset, and now they needed to develop again for the second. We knew it would happen, so we used that as an advantage. I believe we’ll be one of the first teams to use something that is not HoloLens to offer to our users.

We’re using EQT Foundation’s funding to invest in new hardware – both headsets and tracking devices. We’re not just creating something that’s a viewer anymore. We can now digitize how surgeons move their hands (and the instruments). Once we overlay the patient’s 3D model on top of the real human, the next step is telling the surgeon where the bone saw is relative to the target. We’ll digitize how they aim, like in a video game. This is the race we have to win this year.

Q: What’s your advice to startups considering applying to the EQT Impact Challenge?

Louis Sze: I’ve been to a lot of competitions, and they usually look at your traction more than your impact. That means really big-sized startups end up winning.

But we won EQT when we were still small; EQT still chose us. That means they’re looking at something else. They look for impact. So startups that might not measure up in other competitions have a completely different chance here. It’s a different game.

Q: What’s next for Syngular?

Louis Sze: This year, we’re aiming to double our annual recurring revenue to €200,000.

We recently got a purchase order from a Belgian university, so that’s our first international paying customer!

We’re also in negotiations with the Spanish university I mentioned, alongside partners in Toronto and Israel, who will hopefully convert into paying clients.

We’ll also resume growth in Hong Kong’s public hospital system once we complete the headset upgrade. We already had four systems there, but we paused to upgrade the technology. Now we can move forward again.

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The 2026 Impact Challenge offers the chance to win a €500,000 investment from the EQT Foundation, a philanthropic division founded in 2019 by partners at EQT. The winner will also receive mentorship from EQT, as well as access to its global network of portfolio companies and advisers. Applicants can apply here.