Nov 27 2017
Where others see craziness we do see our purpose – a week about Shared Mobility Services & Performance Driving at STARTUP AUTOBAHN
Last week, STARTUP AUTOBAHN achieved a new milestone in its history. Our biggest meetup ever with more than 380 guests in the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Stuttgart attracted more than 21 startups from all around the world (US, Canada, UK, North Ireland, Finland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Israel and even South Korea) to present their groundbreaking technology, products and services in the field of Shared Mobility Services and the Future of Performance Driving in front of Daimler, Porsche, HPE, DXC Technology, DPDHL, ZF, BASF, Webasto, Murata, Continental, Shell, Deutsche Bank, IBM, John Deere, AGC Glass, Jardines and other corporations.
During the morning and afternoon deep dive sessions startups set up demonstrations of their prototypes and sat together with business unit experts to discuss potential joint use cases. Amongst the adrenaline racing startup entrepreneurs to attend were Bryn Balcombe of UK’s Roborace, UK’s Darren Cox of IDEAS + CARS LTD and France’s David Nadal ofEden Games– the last two being part of Canada’s Millennial Esports Corp. Cliff Singleton managed to attract further startup entrepreneurs all the way from Canada such as Simon Ashby ofAudiokinetic and Robert Eisses of Orbitless Drives Inc.German startup leaders such as Thomas Kurrle of Vischers showcased racing simulators while John Brown of Carplane GmbH portrayed the future of flying cars.
For the STARTUP AUTOBAHN event at the Mercedes-Benz Arena Brian Yoo and Kevin Yi of TEGway flew in all the way from South Korea while Tin Hang Liu of OSVehicle arrived from Silicon Valley. Cnaan Aviv of Make My Day,Ido Levy of Safemodeand Ziv Hermon of Silentium Ltd.hopped over from Israel. (Source: Alexander Satanowsky vialinkedin)
21 startups from all around the world (US, Canada, UK, North Ireland, Finland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Israel and even South Korea) came to Stuttgart to present their groundbreaking technology, products and services:
| Wunder Carpool | Hamburg, Germany | Building a new form of public transportation for the world’s most gridlocked cities; Wunder Carpool is already successful in some of the most densely populated cities in the world e.g. in the Philippines. Wunder Carpool is working on innovative monetization approaches in ride sharing. |
| Context360 | San Mateo, U.S. | Use smartphone sensors to identify user patterns that predict physical activities, interests and status. In other words, intent. This is information that exists outside apps – so you get far more relevant data than in-app analytics provides. |
| Fleetonomy | Israel | End to end platform for planning, operating and optimizing fleets of autonomous vehicles. |
| Sentiance | Belgium | Data science company turning IOT sensor data into behavioural insights. Belgium based startup that does a particular good job of contextualising and interpreting data to create behavioural profiles in real time to optimise consumer experience e.g. for ride sharing, fleet management, multimodal mobility management and connected car personal assistant. |
| Silentium | Israel | Active noise cancellation software. With superior technological development they are able to eliminate up to 90% of a sound – no matter if it’s a cooker hood, a ventilator system, a car engine, or even a noisy train. |
| MakeMyDay | Israel | Make My Day is a car personal assistant. It provides the optimal route for all errands based on data such distance to all of the errands,the business with the shortest line, business working hours, parking and traffic |
| OSVehicle | Italy | Modular, open source electric car platform that provides a ‘white-label solutions’ for auto fleets owners. |
| SayMosaic | San Francisco, U.S. | Smart Assistant for Cars – Gain new insights into your drivers while improving their driving experience. Their Natural Language Understanding Engine is built specifically for automotive use cases – which allows it to understand drivers better than competitors. |
| Audiokinetic | Montreal, Canada | Leading global provider of cross-platform audio solutions for the interactive media and gaming industries. Built on innovative technology and years of industry experience, Audiokinetic sets a new standard in audio production. |
| Toroidion | Finland | The Toroidion all-new electric powertrain has been designed to be scalable in power for different applications while remaining safe to use and service.The high-performance battery of the powertrain is as easily replaced in the pit-lane as it is in the home garage. |
| Eden Games | Lyon, France | Almost unrivalled reputation as an independent racing game developer with the huge critical and commercial success of both Test Drive Unlimited and V-Rally. Their successful recent move to mobile games with their first title Gear.Club brought them wide attention. |
| Ideas + Cars | Swindon, UK | They call themselves an “un-agency” – a group of passionate, professional collaborators with a different approach to innovation in motorsport that includes their own virtual racing team. |
| Carplane | Brunswick, Germany | Building a bimodal vehicle for individual road and air transport. Carplane is the world’s only flying car currently undergoing formal certification. |
| Sensum | Belfast, Northern Ireland | Leading the world in measuring customer emotions ‘in the wild’, having worked with the likes of Valeo, Jaguar, Red Bull and Ford, to enhance their products & services, by using our AI tools to understand the user’s emotional state in real time, in any environment, to improve human-machine interfacing.They work across various sectors (emotions and behaviour are widely relevant) but are focusing heavily on mobility, as it is such a disruptive space right now. |
| Tegway | South Korea | TEGway is a developer and manufacturer of flexible thermoelectric modules and systems for power generation and cooling. They also believe our modules can power wearable sensors and IOT devices by harvesting energy from minimal thermal sources such as body heat in the near future. |
| Roborace | London, UK | Autonomous cars compete in driving algorithms on Formula E tracks.Roborace: An extreme Motorsport and Entertainment platform for the future of road relevant technologies. |
| Orbitless | Vancouver, Canada | The Orbtiless Drive Platform the first novel drivetrain technology in generations. It can be used in a variety of applications from Motion Control, Robotics, Electric vehicles, Wind Power or really anywhere gear motors are used . It can be an alternative to a Planetary Drives, Harmonic (strain-wave) or Spur Gearsets, or used in combination to derive the desired ideal gearbox. |
Besides the deep dive sessions we organized an Investor Panel and networking event for the fundraising startups participating in our current batch. Assaf Topazfrom Topaz Tech Capital, Johannes Rhodefrom Capnamic Ventures, Pawel Schapirofrom TA Ventures, Marius Diehlfrom Zukunftsfonds Heilbronn and Julius Ruessmannfrom Earlybird shared their investment strategies on what makes them invest in a company, how the founder knows who the right investors are, Stories about the most successful investment they have ever made,etc. The panel was moderated by the STARTUP AUTOBAHN mentor Ivan Labra.
Our biggest Meetup so far hosted by Daimler with more 380 attendees at included pitches by the Shared Mobility Sevices and the Future of Performance Driving startups, a welcome speech byRolf Lamberti Director Intellectual Property, Trends & Innovation Daimler and a keynote by Mercedes – AMG’s CEO Tobias Moers. Tobias spoke about what AMG is looking for in a startup and his role in the company:
“I define my role in this company as somebody who discovers new things and ideas worth of being shared and developed. It is my responsibility to believe in people and their ideas when nobody else does in order to empower them. (…) Where others may see craziness we do see our purpose.“
Other than that, Sascha Karimpour Managing Director PnP Germany welcomed the guests and gave an introduction into Startup Autobahn also for the participating external corporations – Continental, Shell, Deutsche Bank, IBM, AGC Glass, Jardines, Covea, John Deere, Mahle, Lidl, Metro and Ergo. Furthermore, we listened to a presentation by STARTUP AUTOBAHN China.
Some of our current program 3 startups – Acerta,Bleenco, Cirrantic, Collective Crunch, Contractus, meSchup, ProcessGold and Toposens – gave us an update on the current status of their pilot projects they are working on with our corporate partners.
Thank you all for coming and see you at STARTUP AUTOBAHN Meetup “Edge Intelligence for Smart Cities & Robots, Robotics and Automation” hosted by HPE/DXC on 14th December.
