Fraunhofer Venture
A Startup’s Guide to the Fraunhofer Deeptech Galaxy
At first sight, reseachers and startups seem to work at different ends of a value chain: While researchers solve sophisticated technical problems through forward-looking technologies, startups are piloting practicable market solutions for real customer problems. We believe that a cooperation between researchers and entrepreneurs or startups is the perfect match to start tech-based innovation at speed and scale – and this is what we are working on.
1. Describe your business- or tech-problem
Our match-making approach starts at the technology pain points of your business. Make your pain a gain and describe your technology-needs as precise as possible:
- What business challenges can you solve by custom technology? (f.e. an medical advanced testing environment, a next level-AI algorithm)
- What technical solutions could be a game changer for you?
- What is your idea or vision of cooperation? (f.e. licencing, co-innovation, joint venturing, etc.).
Be as precise as can be to start our match-making engine.
2. Get matching suggestions
If your company and your business concept provides a business case for us, the Techbridge team will start a deeptech-scouting mission in the tech universe of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. Based on a deeptech-search engine, we will crawl through the Fraunhofer galaxy of patents and running technologies, evaluate promising solutions or collaboration scenarios and check formals aspects or technology readiness as well as financial implications.
The team will get back to you with concrete collaboration suggestions and start a dialogue about possible cooperation scenarios.
3. Meet your tech-match
The bigger your challenge, the better your match-making should be – and this is what we are thriving for. A perfect match between a startup and a research-team (“tandem-team”) has to work on three different levels:
- The tech-match: We are not scanning technology per se, but tech-based solutions for a real business challenge to present to our potential partner startups.
- The personal match: Technology is only as good as the operating team, who makes it a real business case. We therefore start team-building even before you meet your team-mates at Fraunhofer to ensure a great teamplay.
- The business match: Our goal is to empower deeptech cooperations – therefore, we have only one working business model: win-win. We offer a portfolio of different cooperation models, like opportunities to licence the “missing tech link”, cooperations in development or even joint-venture like startups. To our tandem-teams we provide legal counsel, unique opportunities to work with Fraunhofer labs and facilities and close working relations to the Fraunhofer Technology Transfer Funds (FTTF) as a possible investment partner. Our revenue on cooperation is a joint path to scale and grow on both sides.
4. Scale up together
You are expert in your market – our technology is there to scale up your business. The majority of startups we partner with, Fraunhofer Tech is the fast track towards the next level of business growth and development, for example a complex AI to boost your existing system or a large test environment for your industry 4.0 application – you name it.
There are many ways to reshape the economy and society with technology partnerships – but there’s only one way to find out if a tech match has what it takes: Work it out and try. Here’s your ticket to meet the Fraunhofer #deeptech galaxy at the CoInnovation Day on Berlin. Hurry up and get one of the remaining startup tickets!