Electrical engineering offers the best opportunities to set up a start-up. The guys from QiTech Industries founded their company back in their school days.

| Jonas Wresch

2024-10-01 VDE dialog

Life as an entrepreneur: Electrifying startups

Electrical engineering students and recent graduates are well-placed to start their own companies and enjoy rapid growth. It’s a move that requires both expertise and stamina. VDE dialog went to meet five young startup teams.

By Manuel Heckel

QiTech Industries: Inventors in the third dimension

Balancing studies and startup? As Simon Kolb relates, it was not an easy task: “Things were pretty stressful in the first year,” recalls the 21-year-old. He and his co-founder Milan von dem Bussche have been growing their company QiTech Industries for almost three years. The young startup works in two areas. First, recycling old plastic, turning it into filament – the feedstock for 3D printers. And second, designing and building vital systems for 3D printing, such as a filament winding machine.

Kolb was already an enthusiastic robotics club member in his school days, and it wasn’t long before he had the idea of founding a company. An inventive spirit is still an important part of the company’s work to this day: the founders, with the team of three they have now built up, develop the software and most of the components themselves. Again, it’s not an easy job. “If you take care of the mechanical engineering, software and electrical engineering yourself, you bring yourself a whole lot of difficulties,” says Kolb with a laugh.

But that doesn’t deter the young entrepreneurs. “To begin with, we spent ages looking for a control system that could be programmed the way we wanted,” says Kolb. When they got stuck, they developed their own industrial controller, designed the necessary control board and constructed an air-cooling system. This allowed them to program in the desired environment and shield the component more reliably from electromagnetic radiation. Some of the expertise they needed came from Google, and some from talking to experts. They have 200 square meters of workshop space in an industrial park at their disposal for tinkering, including heavy machinery and a high-voltage power supply. “It’s fascinating what we learn from this work,” says Kolb. In the long term, the in-house development should also pay off financially. Achieving this means larger volumes. “The outlay to begin with is of course much greater,” says Kolb.

After their first stressful year with the double workload of university and startup, the team has found a new rhythm. The founders order all the parts they need shortly before the exam phase, return to their studies during the delivery period, then dedicate two or three intensive months to development, assembly and delivery. “After that, the cycle starts all over again,” says Kolb.

https://en.qitech.de/

Inventife: Keeping track of all movements

Robin Göbel and Max-Felix Müller brought electrical engineering to prime-time TV this spring. They presented their startup Inventife on the show “Höhle der Löwen” (Lion’s Den), where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to venture capitalists. They brought along their innovative room sensor to show the investors. Göbel had the idea for the product a few years ago when he was studying electrical engineering and wanted to automate the lighting in his room. “There was a lot of talk about smart homes, but in the end I couldn’t find a suitable device,” recalls Göbel.

He pursued this idea further at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Together with Müller, a fellow electrical engineering student, he developed a combined system: an optical sensor detects where people are in a room and follows their movements. The background software is able to analyze this information. “We’ve done a lot of development work so that our system can detect whether someone is lying on the floor or moving through the room, for example,” says Müller.

Unlike more conventional sensors, their system works in much greater detail. This helps it decide whether to switch on the light above a desk or sofa, for instance. And lighting is just the start. Inventife also wants to see its product used in retirement and nursing homes, where the combination of sensor and software could alert staff if a resident has a fall when nobody is looking.

The founders deliberately designed their product with open interfaces so it can connect with other sensors and platforms. “Anyone can use the system in the way they need it,” says Göbel, “that’s the true idea behind smart living.” For the time being, the founding team is managing the complex development alone after the investors on “Höhle der Löwen” turned down the opportunity to invest. Expertise certainly helps here: “We’re experienced electrical engineers and it’s not the first time we’ve done this kind of product development,” says Göbel. “This means we can do a lot ourselves, which allows us to reduce costs here and there.”

https://www.inventife.com/en

Fisego: All fired up about fire protection

It started a few years ago, when volunteer firefighter Fabian Goedert was called out to a basement fire. It turned out that a washing machine connected to a faulty multiple socket had caused the blaze. It’s an everyday danger – but Goedert couldn’t find a suitable device on the market to reduce the risks. Out of this initial impetus emerged the startup Fisego, whose mission is to prevent fires before they start or snuff them out shortly after the first spark.

Now a multiple socket has been created to offer precisely this protection. The seemingly simple device is based on complex technology, combining hardware and software. The system constantly analyzes power consumption and the power signatures of the plugged-in devices. “You can use this data to identify whether a component is developing a defect,” says Goedert. A specially developed app can set load limits for each socket and issue a warning if they are exceeded. The socket strip also functions as an electricity meter and measuring device and can be integrated into smart home systems.

So far, the startup is self-funded. Goedert and his co-founder Sophia Reiter were both students at the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen (a university of applied sciences in Gießen). Goedert was studying to be a civil engineer, while Reiter took electrical engineering. “I always found the idea of starting a business exciting – but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to start my own business with,” says the 25-year-old Reiter.

The VDE Institute is currently testing the entrepreneurs’ invention. After that, sales are set to really take off. Kindergarten operators, local authorities and government agencies have already signaled their interest in the socket. Fire safety officers, employers’ liability insurance associations, testing organizations and insurance companies are receptive to the product, as the founding team points out.

And their ideas go even further. The technology can also be used to build other, modular fire protection systems for machines and systems that contain suitable extinguishing agents. “We want to be for fire protection what the Aquastop is for the washing machine,” says Goedert.

https://www.fisego.de/ (in German)

FISEGO

I3Denergy: Vision for power and heat

Instead of bombarding their audience with data, Rachel Maier and Christopher Ripp like to start their presentation with a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. The “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” is intended to symbolize what energy management looks like at many companies today. Those in charge look down on their own company from above – and yet mostly look into the gray unknown. The startup, I3DEnergy, strives to change this by linking information from electricity, heat, cooling and gas meters: “Thanks to us, every company can develop its own digital twin, allowing it to save costs and emissions,” says Ripp, summarizing the offering of the company founded in 2023.

The software is designed to dock onto existing or newly installed measurement technology. Users draw the locations of the measurements on street maps or their own plans, such as the floor plans of their own company premises. The system then shows how much energy is being used and where, revealing any areas of excessive consumption: “Up to now, evaluating energy management has often been a time-consuming process involving pen, paper or Excel spreadsheets,” says Maier. “We want to automate energy management from end to end.”

Companies can also view their CO2 emissions at the touch of a button. In the future, the team hopes to forecast demand with the help of artificial intelligence and optimize the energy supply with mathematical methods. That will help companies that purchase electricity and heat on a daily basis or produce some of it in their own power plants.

I3DEnergy is the result of a research project at TU Darmstadt, where the founding team tested their ideas directly in practice and connected an entire university campus to their system. By pinpointing inefficient consumption and recommending improvements to the energy supply, the team identified hundreds of thousands of euros in potential savings. On top of this, administrative expenses for energy management were cut by 90 percent.

The startup is currently completing its first round of financing, looking for industrial partners as customers and taking part in competitions. This summer, Maier and Ripp won the DKE startup prize “All Electric Society.” “This provides visibility and builds trust,” says Ripp.

https://www.i3denergy.de/e

Studio Hoffmann

Hydro Technology Motors: Founders turn the big wheel

“We kind of stumbled into founding a startup,” admits Maximilian Wack. The initial impetus came from a dedicated chemistry teacher, with whom he and his classmate Silas Hofmann built a small hydrogen production plant when they were at school. The two school friends remained fascinated by this technology, recalls the now 25-year-old Wack: “We were convinced there had to be a way to use hydrogen as an ideal fuel in low-cost drive systems.”

At the end of 2019, they founded Hydro Technology Motors with this goal in mind, and later brought two more founders on board. Since then, the team has been working on developing a hybrid drive system in which a hydrogen combustion engine runs in parallel to an electric motor. “This allows the vehicles to achieve high levels of torque when pulling away and to cope with peak loads – while at the same time boasting long running times,” says Wack.

Much of the work is done in house. The startup team, which currently consists of eleven people, is converting a basic engine to hydrogen and writing the powertrain software itself. The transmission unit and the battery pack are also specially assembled from components. The founders have already converted a standard delivery van, creating a vehicle with an unchanged unladen weight and maximum payload and very similar performance data. The only real change is the emission-free powertrain. “Our system will be modular so that it can be used for as many different applications as possible,” says Wack.

The founders see the greatest potential wherever large vehicle fleets constantly have to move large loads. “We feel comfortable with around 100 kilowatts of power.” That might entail municipal vehicles, forklift trucks or airport service vehicles that tirelessly drive around pulling trailers packed with suitcases, for example. Hydrogen tanks are currently being built at airports around the world to produce e-fuels.

The startup frequently collaborates with institutes at TU Darmstadt, where some of the founders studied. The twenty-somethings have already raised €1.5 million in venture capital from investors. That means modest development costs by industry standards. Yet the small team intends to achieve great things.

https://www.hydrotechnologymotors.de/en