Cyclize, a spin-off from the University of Stuttgart, has developed a technology to defossilize the chemical industry using mixed plastic waste and CO2 as raw materials to produce synthesis gas (a gas mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen). This synthesis gas is a fundamental building block for advanced chemicals and is used in making plastics, methanol, hydrogen, and e-fuels. Until now, synthesis gas has been obtained through the linear use of fossil resources such as natural gas. The innovative plasma-based process replaces fossil resources with waste materials, enabling a circular carbon economy and avoiding hundreds of megatons of CO2 annually by 2050.

Scenarium AI is building the AI-powered design software the construction industry is asking for - for all planners and all planning steps. It generates collision-free, completely norm-conform, and material-efficient design suggestions in minutes instead of weeks. The company was founded in 2023 by Katja Elkhanova and Emil Azadian. With their family backgrounds in construction, both founders have been familiar with the industry's challenges. Before starting Scenarium AI, Katja Elkhanova helped to build Cosuno, a construction tech startup digitizing the management of subcontractors, where she was leading the demand generation efforts. Emil Azadian built deep learning algorithms and synthetic datasets at the AI company Audatic, helping to achieve a successful exit. The two founders met at Entrepreneur First - Europe's leading talent investor.

The Munich-based PropTech Predium was founded in 2021 by Jens Thumm, Mohamed Ali Razouane and Maximilian Körner. The three founders developed the intelligent operating system for decarbonizing real estate. Predium enables a simple and fast overview of the ESG performance of buildings as well as action plans for CO2 reduction including investment calculations. In addition, Predium offers automated reporting according to established industry standards such as GRESB and Ecore as well as customer-specific templates. Predium thus offers a holistic solution for sustainable and profitable real estate management.

Rencore is a B2B software company providing award-winning solutions essential for staying in control of cloud collaboration technologies. Their customers rely on their tools to simplify, automate, and speed up their everyday governance, risk, and compliance challenges. Rencore’s diverse, global customer base ranges from mid-sized businesses to enterprises that use their products as SaaS or self-hosted tools. Consultancies and managed service providers build their cloud governance and operations services around Rencore’s powerful solutions.

Lilium N.V. is a publicly listed aviation company. The company is creating a sustainable and accessible mode of high-speed, regional transportation for people and goods. Using the Lilium Jet, an all-electric vertical take-off and landing jet, offering leading capacity, low noise, and high performance with zero operating emissions, Lilium is accelerating the decarbonization of air travel. Working with aerospace, technology, and infrastructure leaders, and with planned launch networks announced in Germany, the United States, Brazil, and the UK, Lilium’s 800+ strong team includes approximately 450 aerospace engineers and a leadership team responsible for delivering some of the most successful aircraft in aviation history. Founded in 2015, Lilium’s headquarters and manufacturing facilities are in Munich, Germany, with teams based across Europe and the U.S.

ChargeX GmbH, based in Munich, founded in 2018, develops and produces charging infrastructure solutions and products for electric vehicles. The company has already installed several thousand charging points. The modular solution Aqueduct is the world's only intelligent and patented multiple sockets for electric cars. It enables the charging of many vehicles with just one main connection. Via Plug&Play, the grid-serving system can be expanded to up to 10 charging points, distributing the energy to the vehicles to be charged according to demand. With its charging solution, ChargeX pursues the goal of charging e-cars when they are not needed, at home, and at work.

Reverion GmbH is a spin-off of the Technical University of Munich. The start-up develops the technology, which was successfully validated in a research project, to commercial maturity and markets it as a plant manufacturer. The container-based plants can replace conventional gas engines with their low efficiencies and can be operated with hydrogen in addition to biogas. In addition, plants produce pure CO2 as a byproduct of power generation, so they can operate CO2-negatively.

Molten Industries produces low cost, clean hydrogen and solid carbon through methane pyrolysis to decarbonize the world’s chemical and heavy industries.

paretos is the leading AI-based decision intelligence platform to make effective, data-driven decisions across entire organizations, enabling business users to evaluate complex data, predict future scenarios and take optimal actions via a no-code UI and integrations with no prior data science knowledge needed.

Reel is a climate tech start-up aiming to democratize the energy market and accelerate the development of renewable energy on a global level. With their Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), making an impact on climate change becomes easy, accessible for all, and financially attractive.

planqc builds scalable quantum computers that operate at room temperature by controlling atoms in artificial crystals of light. (Lab photo copyright: Axel Griesch, team photo copyright: Roman Bause)

Patronus is building the central collaboration software for everyone who cares for an elderly person. They started with an emergency software for wearables to onboard the elderly themselves and are now expanding to other target groups like the family carers. Its mission is to increase efficiency in elderly care to prepare for the demographic shift ahead.

kooky, a brand of Zurich-based CEBS AG, focuses on developing alternative solutions for disposable tableware. They developed the first intelligent reusable cup system with its own digital return infrastructure.

The Berlin-based B2C FinTech company launched the first hybrid financial coaching app for saving and investing money. Bringing together financial advice from an AI bot and human experts motivates young people to make early provisions for their financial future. Over the next five years, Forget Finance aims to become the first all-in-one holistic personal finance platform.

A highly efficient gearless in-wheel motor that addresses cost and range, which are the biggest issues faced by electric vehicles.

Proxima Fusion is working to develop power plants via optimized stellarators, devices that form magnetic cages for high-energy matter. Proxima is the first-ever spin-out company from the Max Planck Society Institute for Plasma Physics, which built and operates the most advanced stellarator on the planet, W7-X. Research over the past decade has now set the stage for Proxima to leverage modern optimization tools and design capabilities, and accelerate fusion. With W7-X reaching high-performance in continuous operation, uniquely among fusion concepts, Proxima Fusion is catalyzing the creation of a new fusion ecosystem in Europe. Connecting partners from industry and academia, the Proxima Fusion founding team, coming together from the Max Planck Society, MIT and Google, is now entering the race for fusion energy to turn stellarators into economically viable fusion power plants.

STABL Energy makes battery storage more efficient, more safe, affordable, and allows easy re-use of second-life batteries.

fruitcore robotics specializes in the development, production and marketing of technically outstanding and easy-to-use robot systems.

Tanso Technologies enables industrial companies to become part of the solution to a lower carbon economy. The Munich-based startup aims at making sustainability accounting as integrated, transparent and verifiable as financial accounting. Tanso’s end-to-end sustainability management platform enables industrial companies to actively leverage their data in taking positive climate action and creating real business value.

Aleph Alpha, the leading company in explainable and trustworthy generative AI applications, has raised capital and forged key strategic partnerships in a series B financing round to launch the next stage of its development in the global AI race. The consortium consisting of seven new investors is led by the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (Ipai), Bosch Ventures and Schwarz Group. Other new investors include Berlin-based Christ&Company Consulting, the global edge-to-cloud company Hewlett Packard Enterprise and German multinational enterprise application software company SAP, as well as investor Burda Principal Investments. Former investors complete the round. This strategic investment will further strengthen the German and European AI position for the development of sovereign AI.

Wire’s award-winning collaboration and communications platform counts over 1,800 government and enterprise customers worldwide. Wire offers messaging, audio/video conferencing, file-sharing, and external collaboration – all protected by the most advanced end-to-end encryption.

Valuedesk provides a savings- and value management software, which allows a company-wide identification of hidden savings potentials and provides the processes to implement measures in a structured way.

Strategic procurement today needs to be efficient, resilient, and sustainable – but drowns in transactional activities. Ever-increasing complexity in terms of parts, suppliers, and supply chains as well as lacking internal and external data transparency requires novel solutions to drive competitive advantage. Tacto supports procurement teams to focus on what matters by automating what does not.

Hypatos is applying language processing AI and computer vision tech to speed up financial document processing for business use-cases such as invoices, travel and expense management, loan application validation and insurance claims handling via — touting a training dataset of more than 10M annotated data entities.

finn.auto offers an all-inclusive car subscription which stands out due to its fair and transparent return conditions, the short-term availability of the cars and maximum flexibility in the market: customers can change or cancel their car at any time. By offsetting the CO2 emissions of its fleet, the startup enables a more sustainable mobility.

Synera stands for Connected Engineering and is the first low code platform of its kind transforming the product development process. Based on intelligent algorithms, it enables engineers to model product development steps digitally in a low code work environment, run them, and systematically reuse their work for new variants or projects. This leads to a more efficient use of product knowledge and accelerates development significantly. Application areas include the automotive industry and aerospace. The company is developed by engineers for engineers: The founders have provided engineering services at the Alfred Wegener Institute for over 10 years and have designed a visual programming language for more efficient design and execution of their projects. Customers include BMW, Hyundai, MAN, EDAG, Premium Aerotec, and Miele. Formerly known as ELISE, the company became Synera in 2022.

HQS Quantum Simulations is developing quantum algorithms to predict molecular properties for specialty chemicals & pharmaceutical companies.

i2x leverages the power of AI to transform the human voice into actionable insights at the speed of a face-to-face conversation.

Ciara provides inside sales teams with interactive guides, proven playbooks, and smart objection handling, helping them to structure their phone conversations and increase their success and productivity.

Capmo provides a construction software solution to manage construction plans, progress and defects. The productivity tool is enabling the record and assignment of tasks and is available on computers, smartphones, and tablets – even in offline mode. Capmo is used by architects and engineers on private construction sites as well as by construction companies for major projects.

Munich-based company DyeMansion offers a variety of high-volume finishing systems for an easy ‘Print-to-Product’ workflow that transforms raw, 3D-printed parts into high-value consumer and industrial products.

Isar Aerospace was founded in 2018 to lower the entry barriers to space. By pushing the boundaries they are opening space as a platform for future technologies and competitiveness. As a launch service provider for small and medium-sized satellites they create easy access to space for global customers. Offering the first fully privately funded European solution to meet the growing global demand, Isar Aerospace is driving commercial space across all continents.

TWAICE supports enterprises across industries with digital twin-based predictive battery analytics software.

Innoactive provides the leading enterprise software platform for scaling VR training and enabling collaborative industrial planning in VR.

FAZUA provides leading e-Bike drive systems for ambitious sports riders in all segments.

Blickfeld offers LiDAR sensors and detection software for autonomous mobility and IoT applications.

3YOURMIND offers automation software to manage additive manufacturing part selection, ordering, and production workflows for Industry 4.0.

shyftplan is a SaaS solution for employee management and communication. While the core product is scheduling, shyftplan brings everything together by offering solutions for absence management, time tracking, working time accounts, HR management, and payroll.

Vimcar is a Germany-based company developing a fleet management SaaS solution and vehicle tracking systems for SMEs.

Loyalty Prime is a leading international provider of innovative customer loyalty solutions for enterprise clients.

Everskill offers an app-based training system for employee’s soft skills and helps trainers as well as L&D experts to revolutionize their learning culture.

KONUX is a leading German AI scale-up, transforming railway operations for a sustainable future.

Carjump was a Car-Sharing-App which combined the offers of different car-sharing providers. In 2017, the company was majority acquired by the PSA Group to expand its mobility services. At this time, the offering was branded under the PSA mobility brand Free-2-Move. Through the platform, users can access various car-sharing offers such as Car-2-Go (Daimler), Drive Now (BMW), and Multicity (PSA Group).

PSA Group

VEACT is developing applications, processes and products to improve sales success in the car trade market using data-based marketing.

GNA Biosolutions was a molecular diagnostics company. The technology it developed, called Pulse Controlled Amplification (PCA), is based on the molecular gold standard, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), but works much faster (minutes instead of hours) and can be used to produce small, portable, and energy-efficient devices ideal for near-patient diagnostics outside the laboratory. In February 2021, the Silicon Valley corporation Hewlett Packard acquired 100% of the company and fully integrated it into HP.

HP Health Solutions

AMW develops and markets drug delivery systems. Its portfolio includes active ingredient/biodegradable implants and transdermal systems in the areas of oncology, pain therapy, and neurology.

Flix is a global mobility provider which, since 2013, has been changing the way millions of people worldwide are traveling, under the FlixBus brand, and more recently also with FlixTrain. As a unique combination of a tech start-up, an e-commerce company, and a classic transport operator, they have become the market leader in many different regions and within a very short time, they have created Europe’s largest long-distance bus network. With FlixTrain, since 2018 Flix has also been offering a constantly growing range of train connections and intermodal travel options.

Dynamic Biosensors provides instruments and consumables for the advanced analysis of biomolecular interactions on biochips and single cells, which enable breakthroughs in drug discovery, life science research, and cell and gene therapies.

Orpheus GmbH, Nuremberg was a leading provider of software for transparency and potential analytics in strategic procurement. The company was acquired in 2020 by the strategy consulting firm McKinsey & Company and continued as "Orpheus, a McKinsey company," an offering to create transparency across company-wide distributed purchasing data, enable expenditure and cost analysis, and simplify the control and measurement of procurement success. In 2021 Orpheus became Spendscape by McKinsey a Software as a Service (SaaS) analytics platform.

McKinsey & Company

SorTech AG, founded by Walter Mittelbach in 2002 as a spinoff from the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, evolved into Fahrenheit AG, now the leading developer and manufacturer of adsorption technology. This technology allows the creation of cooling from waste heat. With a robust portfolio of expertise and numerous patents in adsorption technology, Fahrenheit delivers significant energy and cost savings to its customers, making a sustainable impact on environmental protection. The company's headquarters are located in Munich, with its manufacturing operations based in Halle.

Fos4X, was a Munich-based company, specialized in fiber optic sensor technology and data analysis, offering intelligent sensor and software solutions. It was acquired by Polytech in 2020, a Danish technology company active in the wind energy sector. Through this acquisition, Polytech aimed to enhance its expertise in rotor blades, optimizing and protecting future rotor blade designs and operations.

Polytech A/S