Swiss engineering startup RAROG has secured €162,000 (CHF 150,000) from Venture Kick to commercialize a portable detection system that turns ordinary personal electronics into effective rescue beacons — potentially transforming how emergency teams locate missing people in the field.
The Problem With Current Search Methods
Finding missing persons in challenging environments — dense forests, mountain terrain, disaster rubble, or low-visibility weather — remains stubbornly slow. Most existing approaches rely on visual scanning, rescue dogs, or mobile network infrastructure, each with significant limitations.
When a person isn't carrying a dedicated GPS beacon or personal locator device, the challenge compounds dramatically. Hundreds of lives are lost each year in environments like the Swiss Alps simply because emergency teams can't locate victims fast enough.
How RAROG's Technology Works
RARE's system identifies the passive radio signals emitted by consumer electronics that most people already carry — smartphones, smartwatches, and fitness trackers. Critically, it does this without requiring mobile network connectivity or any external infrastructure.
Key capabilities include:
- Detection through vegetation, fog, snow, and rubble
- Fully portable, field-deployable hardware
- No requirement for the subject to take any action or carry specialist equipment
The co-founders — Alexander Marinšek, Uroš Hudomalj, and Marko Hudomalj — are targeting a gap that dedicated rescue beacons can't close: the reality that most missing persons simply don't carry specialized emergency hardware.
Early Deployments Already Underway
RARE isn't just a prototype-stage concept. The system is actively being piloted in mountain rescue operations, from the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland to the Swiss Alps. This real-world validation during the funding phase is notable — it suggests the technology is past proof-of-concept and moving toward operational reliability.
Beyond mountain rescue, the company is targeting a broader set of emergency response use cases:
- Firefighters searching collapsed structures
- Civil protection units responding to natural disasters
- General emergency services requiring rapid person-location capability
The addressable market is substantial: the team cites millions of rescuers worldwide who could benefit from a system that doesn't depend on victim preparation or network availability.
What the Funding Covers
The €162K Venture Kick grant will be deployed across four near-term priorities:
- Finalizing product development during active pilots
- Completing CE marking for European market entry
- Manufacturing the first production batch of detection systems
- Scaling the team to support commercial launch
Why This Matters Beyond Search and Rescue
From a technology perspective, RAROG represents a broader pattern: leveraging the radio frequency emissions of ubiquitous consumer devices as an unintentional but exploitable signal layer. This passive detection approach sidesteps the coordination problem that has long hampered emergency tech — you can't guarantee victims will carry the right equipment, but you can reasonably assume they'll have a phone.
The startup's challenge now is less about technical feasibility and more about regulatory clearance, operational integration with rescue services, and manufacturing at scale — the classic valley of death between working prototype and deployed product. The Venture Kick funding is modest but structured to close exactly that gap.
