DESY backed Start-up and pre-founding projects successful at pitch events
Take two: That could be the motto for the team of the DESY Start-up Office, which saw two of their backed teams win big in recent start-up and business idea pitches. Ekaterina Zapolnova convinced the crowd and won the 2nd place at the “Female StartAperitivo” competition with her idea for the business model based on versatile broadband spectrometer. WiredSense won the Hamburg Gründergeist pitch with their new product “Sweeb”, a table-top instrument to identify the chemical composition of materials.
Also dubbed “Eventember” this September has been successful for start-ups and pre-founding projects, which are backed by the DESY Start-up Office. In the course of the "Female StartAperitivo" start-up competition in Hamburg, Ekaterina Zapolnova managed to pitch the idea for a business based on her idea for a broadband spectrometer to the finale, where she received the 2nd prize. Her start-up in planning, 5pectre Optix, has an ambitious goal: to develop the world's smallest broadband spectrometer. She was able to proof the principle with a very first, but larger version of the spectrometer. Now she is working on the compactification of this 1st proof of concept as a working prototype.
The "Female StartAperitivo" start-up competition is a new event series, organized by the Hamburg Investors Network (HIN), which is an initiative of the Hamburg “Behörde für Wirtschaft und Innovation“. This competition shall foster female founders and offer a platform to meet investors and develop a business network.
The WiredSense team won 1st prize at the Gründergeist start-up and idea competition by the “Junge Unternehmer” (Young entrepreneurs) hosted by the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce on September 29th. Their new product – a table-top detection device to identify chemical components – convinced the jury in a very competitive field. Both founders Matthias Budden and Thomas Gebert met each other at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, where they developed the idea for a company based on sensitive infrared detectors they developed for their research.
The fact that both winners have a background in spectroscopy showcases, the impact and relevance for a lot of applications as well as the overall need for versatile, cheap and mobile analysis solutions, especially if space and costs are an issue. “Competence and excellence in research once again is driving technological developments at a very high level. Through a thorough innovation and transfer process these ideas, rooted in science, will deliver a positive impact for society as a whole and the start-ups and their customers specifically,” says Arik Willner, Chief Technology Officer at DESY.
DESY is supporting both projects via the DESY Start-up Office. Both teams, the founders of WiredSense as well as Ekaterina Zapolnova’s 5pectre Optix receive consulting and guidance to build sustainable business models with roots in science.
published
- 2022/10/04
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