Startup Showcase

Pioneers – Spin-offs and Start-ups

These founders are on the rise: they are building something of their own because they couldn't let go of an idea.

June 2026

The End of Every Dry Spell

Drought Analytics

“It bothers me when we do not think research through to the end,” says David Mengen. At the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences - Agrosphere, he saw what hydrological models could do. Ever since, one question has driven him: where does this research create real value, and for whom? His first idea led to risk analyses for insurers and agricultural companies. But conversations with practitioners changed his view. The models could do more than assess risk from a distance. They could help farms make better decisions in the field.

Farmers often irrigate by experience and instinct. Yet deciding when to water, and how much, remains a daily challenge. A short shower may wet the surface while deeper soil layers stay dry enough to cause irreversible damage to crops. What matters is not whether rain has fallen, but how much water actually reaches the plant. Together with Dr. Felix Nieberding and Dr. Olga Dombrowski, Mengen founded Drought Analytics. The original idea was a dashboard that would calculate the probability of drought events. It became something more practical: a digital twin of the field.

„It bothers me when we do not think research through to the end."

— David Mengen

_{Drought Analytics - Dr. Felix Nieberding, Dr. Olga Dombrowski and David Mengen}

Better Planning with Dürrepilot

The system combines high-resolution weather forecasts, crop growth models and data from solar-powered sensors that farmers can install themselves. Conventional tools measure soil moisture in the moment. Their Dürrepilot looks ahead. It knows how much water a crop variety needs at each stage of growth and simulates, in real time, how well plants can draw water from the soil under changing conditions. The app can sound the alarm up to five days before a field reaches the critical red zone. That lead time turns farmers’ instinct into precise timing. Early warning can protect harvests from the slow death of heat stress - and save large amounts of water.

The team now works from Cologne and is looking south and east, to regions of Europe where drought is already threatening food security. There, Drought Analytics aims to give major agricultural regions something they urgently need: planning certainty before the next dry spell becomes a crisis.

Drought Analytics Website

When the Chemistry Works

Virida Biocat

“If I work with biocatalysis, I want it to become more than another publication,” says Dr. Torsten Sehl, founder of VIRIDA Biocat. The spark for the start-up came where many deep-tech stories begin: at the lab bench. Even as a doctoral researcher, Sehl was asking how his work could make the leap into real production. “I wanted to develop processes that actually reach industry,” he says. At the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences - Biotechnology, he met entrepreneur Dr. Thomas Daussmann. He found not only a co-founder, but a mentor.

Together, they want to help renew the chemical industry from within - using biocatalysis. Daussmann, who also earned his doctorate in Jülich and founded his first company in 1999, now heads the partner company Enzymaster Deutschland GmbH.

With VIRIDA, Sehl and Daussmann help customers in pharmaceuticals, flavors and fragrances, and specialty chemicals make their production processes both greener and commercially viable. The name says as much: virida comes from Latin and means “become green”. “That is exactly what we want to help our partners do,” Sehl says.

Many industrial processes were designed in an age of cheap raw materials. They burn too much energy and leave too much waste behind. Sustainable alternatives have existed for years, but they have often been too expensive or too difficult to scale. VIRIDA’s lever is the enzyme: nature’s own catalyst, able to steer chemical reactions so that they use less energy and produce fewer waste streams.

„I wanted to develop processes that would actually find their way into industry."

— Dr. Torsten Sehl

_{Dr. Torsten Sehl and Dr. Thomas Daussmann}

Biocatalysis from a One-Stop Shop

VIRIDA presents itself as a one-stop shop for industry. The team analyses a customer’s process, then uses AI-assisted enzyme engineering to tailor enzymes for the job. In its Jülich laboratories and pilot plant, it tests the result at scales of up to 100 litres. The partnership with Enzymaster then opens the way into industrial-scale production.

The founders are already looking beyond specialist niches. VIRIDA and Enzymaster are increasingly targeting bulk chemicals: high-volume substances such as bio-based nylon and glucaric acid. As consumers and companies demand more sustainably produced materials, Jülich enzyme technology could soon find its way into cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals as well.

Exploring the VIRIDA BioCat Website

Ending the Excel Chaos

Minimum Energy

The route seemed mapped out for Leander König-Kotzur: research, papers, perhaps a professorship. Then the engineer stepped away from energy systems research at Forschungszentrum Jülich and took a very different turn. The models he had built were already working at continental scale. During the gas embargo, the German federal government used them to calculate scenarios for Europe’s energy supply. But König-Kotzur began wondering whether the same kind of intelligence could help much smaller systems too: the factory next door, for instance. To find out, he co-founded minimum energy with colleagues.

The first conversations were sobering. One potential investor put it bluntly: the automated optimization platform was impressive technology, but what problem did it actually solve? König-Kotzur and his co-founders drew a conclusion many start-ups reach too late. They stopped polishing their business case for investors and started listening to customers.

Those customers are the people trying to make industrial energy systems work better: planners, consultants and energy managers. Take a paper mill. It uses huge amounts of electricity and may be ready to invest in photovoltaics or battery storage. But which technology pays off? At what size? In what combination? Many planners still fight their way through a maze of spreadsheets, because conventional tools struggle to reflect Germany’s complex rules, grid fees and tariffs. minimum energy is designed to replace that Excel chaos with something companies can actually use. Its promise: show when an investment really pays, and make complex energy systems manageable in seconds.

„Our platform makes the energy transition plannable and financially viable."

— Dr. Leander König-Kotzur

_{Dr. Leander König-Kotzur, Dr. Stanley Risch, Leon Schneider, Dr. Felix Kullmann}

Energy Systems at the Click of a Mouse

The platform builds a digital twin of a site: a virtual version of the factory and its energy system. It then simulates how solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and other technologies interact under real operating conditions.

Using multi-use optimization, the software can calculate how one storage system can do several jobs at once: cover more of the company’s own electricity demand, shave expensive peak loads and trade on the power market. Compared with simple static planning, that can lift returns by up to 50 percent. More than 50 customers now use the tool, and the company is expanding. Its own AI agents are already training on data from more than 4,000 sites across Europe, with the aim of making planning faster still.

For a long time, the team admits, it thought too much like engineers. The business only began to move once sales and customer work caught up with the technology. König-Kotzur sums up the mission in one sentence: “Our platform makes the energy transition plannable and financeable.”

minimum.energy Website

Hotter Than the Competition

CerBaTec

Charge. Discharge. Keep going. That is what a conventional rechargeable battery has to do. The world’s first ceramic sodium solid-state battery, developed by Dr. Melanie Finsterbusch-Rosen and Dr. Martin Finsterbusch, is designed to do more. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, it keeps working in intense heat - at temperatures where other systems can become a safety risk.

“When you hold a patent like that in your hands, you do not simply move on to the next paper,” says Finsterbusch-Rosen from the Institute of Energy Materials and Devices - Materials Synthesis and Processing. The fact that the team seized what she calls a “once-in-a-lifetime chance” was partly down to timing. Just as they completed their first proof of concept, Forschungszentrum Jülich launched its next cohort of the JUICE entrepreneurship training programme. Finsterbusch-Rosen joined on impulse - and her team went on to win the final Innovation Contest. The foundation for CerBaTec had been laid.

„When you hold a patent like that in your hands, you do not simply move on to the next paper."

— Dr. Melanie Finsterbusch-Rosen

_{Dr. Melanie Finsterbusch-Rosen and Dr. Martin Finsterbusch}

Early conversations with investors brought the hard market reality into focus. A European start-up would struggle to compete on price with mass-produced Asian battery technology. So the founders chose extremes over mass markets. They positioned their battery for temperatures between 85 and 180 degrees Celsius - a range in which rechargeable batteries usually give up.

In energy plants or industrial furnaces, storage systems must tolerate enormous heat, operate safely and last for years. CerBaTec’s solid-state battery remains stable under those conditions. Over the next few years, the company wants to show that its technology can withstand not only thermal pressure, but commercial pressure too.

CerBaTec Website

All Clean

7EX

Start-up teams often begin with an idea. At 7EX Technologies, it happened the other way round. Marten Huck and Andreas Kuhlmann met in the lab, worked on similar questions and used the same experimental setups. They spent days running measurements, slept too little and gradually learned how the other person worked. “That is how trust developed,” they say. The team existed before the business idea had a name.

Then they spotted an unusual dataset: a pattern that did not match the comparison data. Under specific electrochemical conditions, they realized, lithium could be extracted at very high purity. Their institute director, Prof. Hans-Georg Steinrück at the Institute for a Sustainable Hydrogen Economy, encouraged them to think beyond the next paper. He shifted their scientific tunnel vision from publications to patents.

Lithium in Demand

Lithium matters because it powers so much of modern life: smartphones, electric cars and battery storage systems. Demand is rising fast. But opening new sources takes time, and conventional lithium extraction - from open-pit mines or salt lakes - can leave deep environmental scars.

7EX takes a different route. The company extracts the alkali metal from sources that have barely been used so far: geothermal brines and industrial process water. Its electrochemical process filters even tiny concentrations directly out of liquids, precisely where other methods reach their limits. The system runs entirely on renewable electricity and uses no additional chemicals.

For now, the prototype still fits into a box. Within five years, the researchers want to bring a full-scale system to market. The team has already won its first innovation awards - an early sign that the idea is moving in the right direction.

_{Marten Huck and Andreas Kuhlmann}

Winner of the JUICE Contest 2025

I Spy With My Little Eye

Sifcam / Floronics

Luis Kremer is 30, a physicist, and suddenly writing business plans. That was never the plan. He had not set out to start a company, and certainly not to spend his days thinking about pitch decks and markets. He wanted to build things: optics, hardware, systems that work. That was exactly why plant scientist Prof. Uwe Rascher from the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences (IBG-2) brought him in. The task was to develop a camera that could make photosynthesis visible.

For farmers, that kind of early warning can make all the difference. It can show when to irrigate, where fertilizer is needed, or where disease may be spreading. The start-up Floronics was founded to turn the technology into a product. Kremer is the lead founder, joined by co-founders Luke Voss and Finn-Henri Smidt.

Kremer was responsible for the hardware. What he built turned out to be useful far beyond the research world. The SIFcam measures something the human eye cannot see: a faint signal that plants emit all the time. This glow in the near infrared is directly linked to photosynthesis. By reading it, the camera can detect when plants are under stress - before leaves wilt and before yields begin to fall.

Floronics Website

_{Luke Voss, Luis Kremer and Finn-Henri Smidt}

Explore our spin-offs at FZ Jülich

Mehrere Geräte, ein Gehirn und zerknülltes Papier auf orangefarbenem Hintergrund. (Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5, 2026-06-30)

Perspectives: The new Issue

Some diagnoses change the way we view our own lives, often leading to a long road, full of uncertainty and unanswered questions.

In this issue, we meet researchers who are developing new approaches to treating cancer, chronic pain and other diseases. Their work is producing insights that could one day change how we view these diagnoses.

» Download Issue (German, PDF)