Even after 25 years, the Baystartup competition continues to play an important role in Munich's ecosystem. Open to all industries, it provides digital and technology-oriented founders in particular with business management input that they can use to develop their ideas into solid entrepreneurial business concepts.
The Munich Business Plan Competition was one of the first competitions of its kind in Germany. When it was founded in the mid-1990s, the topic of business planning was little known. Interest in starting a business, as well as the volume of university publications and teaching materials, were also limited. With startup shows on television and a professionalized startup scene, the relevance of viable business models has now reached a wider audience.
“The fact that interest in the Munich Business Plan Competition has remained so constant despite the coronavirus pandemic, that a high proportion of university startup teams are among the top ten, that the submissions are of high quality, and that there is strong interest in founding companies, speaks volumes about the startup ecosystem in Southern Bavaria,”
says Carsten Rudolph, Managing Director of Baystartup.
Strong biotech scene then and now
The biotech scene in the Munich area was already particularly strong 25 years ago. The focus of the top 10 submissions in the 2021 Munich Business Plan Competition demonstrates that solutions and business concepts for the life sciences market play a particularly important role, especially in the current context: Five out of ten startups are working on technological solutions in health and medicine. These range from approaches in personalized medicine and new cancer therapies to a wellbeing platform and a novel disinfection system. Here are some examples in detail:
The patented HyLOGTechnology simultaneously disinfects room air and surfaces during use. It permanently combats recontamination without being harmful to health. The solution aims to fill a gap in conventional disinfection methods, which currently require people to leave the room.
The startup is fighting against antibiotic-resistant infections InvitrisThe team is developing personalized therapies using bacteriophages (a type of virus and natural enemy of bacteria) that eliminate pathogens in a highly specific manner.
Dymium has developed a technology that can magnetize kidney stones. Magnetic nanoparticles attach to the fragments of crushed kidney stones, which can then be easily and completely removed by the surgeon in a single step. The results include time and cost savings in the operating room, as well as a reduced number of follow-up operations.
From networked machines to an online marketplace for simulation models, the competition participants are also driving forward solutions for industrial and technology companies. For example, the recently funded startup Emocean A real-time "operating system" for mechanical and plant engineering has been developed that enables seamless communication with and between any machines and applications in the field of industrial IoT. Predictive process optimization enables shorter production cycles. Downtime and production losses are avoided, and previously expensive cloud-based AI services can be implemented locally in the smart factory.
Knowron creates a solution that translates analog manuals from mechanical and plant engineering into a digital assistant. The team has developed a system for industrial workers that reads, processes, and analyzes text-based information sources about a product. It can diagnose machine problems and answer general product questions using voice output.
The nominated and award-winning startups in the first phase of the competition are also working on mobility technologies. DeepScenario For example, traffic scenarios are extracted from moving aerial photographs. The software solution calculates how road users behave, for example, in merging lanes on busy roads. The data serves the further development of automated driving and enables algorithms for self-driving cars to be trained, validated, and scaled in a realistic environment before they are deployed on the road.
