“Founding a company is a team sport”

From the very beginning, we have relied on a strong local network: from companies based in the region such as Airbus, BMW, and medium-sized companies that are very interested in innovation. In addition, there are venture capitalists as well as traditional banks. In the meantime, the successful founders from the early years are themselves mentors, supporters or even customers of the next generation of young start-ups. This network, the financing opportunities and the knowledge make us enormously strong.

I had the chance to go to Stanford as a young student of aerospace engineering and I was amazed at how many start-ups emerged from the vicinity of that university. So I made this the topic of my doctoral thesis, compared the conditions at TUM and Stanford and came to the conclusion: what they can do, we can do here in Munich, too.

As is so often the case, the key lies in personal relationships. My mentor, Wolfgang Hermann, was the president of TUM at the time. He had good contacts with the entrepreneur Susanne Klatten. Both were very open-minded. They encouraged me to implement the idea of UnternehmerTUM and made me CEO. Susanne Klatten became Chairwoman of our Supervisory Board. She still supports us in this role today.

A lot has happened in Europe in recent years. Since 2018, there has been an increase in incentives and public funding programmes from the EU and in individual countries. And private investment and venture capital have also increased. In 2021 and 2022, European venture funds raised more money than ever before. In percentage terms, there was even more growth here than in the US.

However, the last year has been difficult for start-ups. While there were slumps in financing throughout Germany, we were nevertheless able to keep attracting investment at UnternehmerTUM: our start-ups raised a total of 2 billion US dollars.

Three main things set us apart: we offer very intensive support for "our" founders – from the initial idea to the IPO. In more than 20 formats and programs, they learn how to develop prototypes, create business plans and what it means to be a CEO in an agile environment.

Second, there are many private and public supporters in our ecosystem. All of them give our start-ups something very specific: advice, experience, network, money – or they are in a customer relationship with our young entrepreneurs. Founding a company is above all: a team sport!

And last but not least, we are very active when it comes to new developments. We need to stay on top of the latest technologies and think about how we can integrate them into our programmes, connect with the leaders and open up new funding opportunities. We are looking in the direction of public funding, but we are also building on partners from the private sector, such as Deutsche Bank, which is now a sponsoring partner and contributes its know-how and international client network.

If we want to keep up with China and the US, we have to think European. There are great start-up centres in the vicinity of universities, such as DTU in Copenhagen or TU Wien in Austria.

In order to leverage the potential of such hubs, we are currently creating "Rise Europe" a network of like-minded people, a network of European start-up ecosystems. Similar to here in Munich, we want to bring together universities, family offices and large companies at the individual locations. Above all, however, it is important that we reduce the hurdles for young companies and make it easier for them to access the market in individual countries. And we want to raise venture capital at the European level.

The aim is to contribute to Europe's technological independence in order to remain competitive. We need to use our world-class knowledge to build technology leaders – especially in the areas of AI, renewable energy and electric vehicles.

Definitely a company that contributes to global sustainability – presumably in the field of nuclear fusion.