Music. Your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene with news, interviews, and live events. Hello and welcome everybody. This is Joe from StartupRate.io, your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany.
Today, I'm bringing you an episode that I've put together with four startup interviews that I did on site towards the end of November 2024 on the Deutsche Business Angel Talk, which is the biannual meeting of the German Business Angel Association, which is using the acronym BAND. And there, of course, was a startup exhibition, and we saw seven interesting startups in total that we could get to interview right on site. So that's why you may hear a little bit background noise.
You may hear people talking and you may hear some wind from time to time. I hope you can understand that this is the price to pay when you really want to have some of the brightest minds coming in front of your microphone here on site instantly and do a little interview. On the other hand, all those interviews are pretty short and I really hope you enjoy it.
As I said, it was towards the end of November 2024. The location was on site in the city of Mainz, and we have been attending the biannual Business Angel meeting taking place in the city. We do have quite a diverse group of different startups with a little bit tending towards biotech, of course, due to the city of Mainz being an emerging biotech hub. You may remember that we've already had a few interviews, plus the home of biotech. I'll leave you with this right now.
As always, happy to have your feedback. Hello and welcome everybody, this is Joe from Celebrate.io. We welcome Ningaloo Biosystems in the person of? I'm Albert Njartlan, co-founder of Ningaloo Biosystems. Can you tell us a little bit what your company Ningaloo Biosystems actually does?
Yeah, we revolutionized the way new drugs, the next generation for cancer therapy, the next generation of drugs for autoimmune diseases and genetic disorders will be made in the scalably and affordably for a large market that actually waits for these drugs to get.
What kind of drugs are we talking about? We're mostly talking about the next generation of cancer therapeutics like antibody formats, so not just monoclonal antibodies that have already been very successful in the market already and with many saving a lot of lives already. The next generation of more complex drugs are now in the starting drugs to actually cure many of the more aggressive types of cancers.
That's one example. The other example is gene therapeutics, which actually cannot just, cure genetic disorders that are found in the whole market or in the small niche of patients, sorry but also broad address broader topics like metabolic disease and the problem really is they are still essentially unaffordable one dose can cost in manufacturing hundred thousands of years, that needs to change and that's what you're working on that's what we are working
on can Can you tell us just a tiny bit for a non-geeky audience how this works? Making these types of drugs, and with the first generation, like monoclonal antibodies, that already works very well, is a little bit like brewing beer. We essentially have a big pot where you put some nutrients in, you put cells in, and the cells actually produce what you want to have. In this case, it's not alcohol, it's the drug, actually, the biological drug that's made.
The problem with that is that you essentially like doing the burn game to just put everything that their cells need into the bioreactor and essentially you wait for 14 days for the process to run without the opportunity to actually interfere or steer the process itself. That's what we want to change.
We introduce a technology that in real time you can control the cells for the first time so you can actually send blue light into a bioreactor and switch on a gene in the production cell, switch it off again. You can use a red light to activate an enzyme, and so forth. So this is sort of a remote control for the production machines that are swimming in the bioreactor. That's, of course, now opening up a whole range of possibilities to control the process.
Can you talk about the current status? How far are you in your startup journey right now? So we know that the technology works, and we are working in collaborations on two projects, one on a cancer therapeutic and actually another one on the gene delivery vector, which is used for genetic diseases, for example, as the first pilot project essentially.
And we could already show that we can influence the composition, also the byproducts that are produced in these processes, to actually optimize the process down the road. It's still small scale, so it's lab scale. That's exactly the entry point for us into the market because process developer and seller developers, They develop a process for making these types of products exactly start on the bench top in the app scale before going into the Next months we will move forward in scaling.
What is your current funding status since you are here on a business angel event, I assume you're looking for investors Yes, we have first pre-seed money, actually mostly from business angels. We are now looking into raising more money to actually show the next milestones in terms of scaling our technology. And then in order to get ready and get into pre-clinical projects with our customers and partners, then we will be raising a seed round of roughly three million.
So that's something for next year, 2020. What strategies do you employ in order to get Ningaloo Biosystems integrated in the production, in the biopharma industry? So, in my previous life, I worked for a large organization that actually is a specialist in producing these types.
So i know what the hurdles are i know what the entry points are i know what the regulatory environment essentially needs in this so it's important to focus on on the initial in the initial steps of designing such a solution to cover all of them and work with the partners that are experts for these types of drugs and the manufacturing environment to actually get ready, to enter such such processes with a new technology it's not easy because pharma
industry biopharma industry is sort of conservative if it comes to quality. So, you need to show that you can actually improve quality and robustness of the processes. That's a big driver for our partners to take on such a need. Talking about the new technology, what KPIs do you use to assess the effectiveness, of your tools, your product, and what successes can you already show at this lab stage? So, that's actually quite dependent on the particular project.
For example, with more complex antibody species, many people are concerned about byproducts. So, it's much about shifting the composition of the product towards the right product so that I don't need to purify away all the massive byproducts. In order to then, you know, lose also a lot of the corrective.
In terms of gene therapy, you know, one of the most popular vectors in this area, which is AAV, a particular virus that's very popular there, the big challenge is you get a lot of empty viruses that you don't want because they're immunogenic, but don't deliver the therapy. So you need also to purify away which is costly and also loses, you know, the loosed product. So in this way, it's actually much more about shifting the production of this virus to get more cured virus.
So that's why you need to work in these types of pilots with these clients to exactly understand what they want and where the pain is highest to improve that process. Great. Best of luck. Let us know when you have a successful funding. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hello and welcome back. I would like to reintroduce you to a former guest. Can you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Henriette Maas. I'm a physicist and founder of Nanostruct BNBH.
You've been a guest in the past. I looked it up in June 2021 with the publication. Can you give us First, a little idea for all the people who did not hear or see your interview, what you guys are doing. With Nanostruck, we are developing a method to detect bacteria within minutes. This is a very, very cool thing because at the moment, it takes several days to know which bacteria is causing a problem. We can do the same thing in a very, very short time.
And can you tell us what development steps you have taken since the last interview? Because my understanding was at this time you were working on reliably building nanostructures. That's right. And these nanostructures are the core of our method and allow to detect always the same amount of bacteria and to make the method available in an industrial sense. So since last time, what we did was we worked with many different types of contaminants. And now we are focusing on only a few.
And one of these is bacteria, which are incredibly interesting for many, many different industries. What is your current stage of development? We are close to having a prototype for the bacterial analysis for laboratories. We will have the prototype ready next year and be ready to start into the market with this product at the end of next year. Most of our audience does have a business background.
Can you elaborate what your prototype could be doing or would be doing like Dumb It Down Barney style? So what our prototype will be doing is it will help laboratories to analyze bacteria very fast. So we will use the current processes which are very regulated and we will take the first step without changing it and then we will step in and take a liquid out of the process and detect whether there are bacteria in there.
And just for me as a non-scientist, what is it useful for and how much can you kind of cut in terms of time the sample spends in the laboratory? So it is useful because at the moment it takes several days to identify bacteria. Bacteria can cause a lot of problems. We are now working mainly with food laboratories and with food producers.
And you can imagine if you have a piece of food and there are bacteria in there and these bacteria are harmful, pathogenic bacteria, which can really hurt people and it takes several days to detect whether they are there. This means the food is very likely already eaten once you know that there has been a problem and we have many cases where producers have to make recalls, bring back food or where people get sick because of bacteria that have been overlooked.
With our tool, we can do the same process, the same analysis, not within days, but in the best case, within minutes. Therefore, it will be possible to detect bacteria before the food goes out to the supermarkets, to the consumers, and we will really save people from getting ill and from dying. How are you currently funded and are you seeking additional investments? We are currently funded via Business Angels and public funds. We are not yet looking for funding, but we will be next year.
So if you like the idea which you have, feel free to connect and ask us for more information. What KPIs and key metrics are you tracking and what results can you show to date? So, one important thing for us in our current status is basically what bacteria can we detect in what concentration. So, both are KPIs, the type of bacteria which we have already in our data bank and which concentrations, depending on the matrix we are working with, are possible to detect.
And these are two parts which we are constantly working on to increasing and decreasing.
Increasing for the first one decreasing for the second one of course and when do your milestones coming up when do you think you'll have a product ready and when do you think you're going to to the next funding round yes so we want to have our prototype ready next year in the middle of next year and once it's ready we can go into a validation the validation is important because without validating our tool, we will not be able to place it in the industry.
This means validation will take another three to six months and we will be ready to market at the end of next year. It's very sunny, so I have to travel like this. Don't worry. Everything is fine. Henriette, thank you very much. It was great having you here, especially with such a great smile. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hello and welcome back. We bring you another interview from the Business Angel Summit 2024 Germany. Today I would like to welcome Bernd Kulke.
And you are from Nutrilose, the app for oncology patients. Can you tell us a little bit what specific challenges related to the malnutrition in casia patients does Nutrilose address? Yes. So, in general, the issue is with the nutritional aspects and then oncology therapy is that the nutritional aspects do not get, until today, in most cases, a necessary relevance.
We all know that there is a drug therapy, which are the cancer drugs more or less, and And in parallel, there's a kind of secondary therapy, it should be, which is a nutritional aspect, because we all know, based on, based on pretty much studies which are unfortunately mostly not conducted in Germany but in the US and Switzerland all over that the nutritional aspects have a very big impact on the positive outcome on a
good outcome of the drug of the oncology therapy but as said unfortunately this is not tackled and yet in in Germany so far for different reasons and the Nutrilose, this app. Should just tackle this issue and really generate a much better therapy outcome for oncology patients. Can you tell us what usually goes wrong? What usually goes wrong is there are several aspects, I would say.
The most relevant, or one of the most relevant ones, is that the oncologists, the doctors, do not pay the right attention, the necessary attention to nutritional aspects in the therapy. That's one case. The reason is why is it as it is? These have different reasons. One is that it's not reimbursed by health insurance companies yet for different reasons. So they only reimburse a drug and everything which is directly related to the cancer drug therapy.
And the second thing is that based on the education they are not so much aware of nutritional aspects and correlation to a very positive oncology therapy and the third is and here I think it is important where we start with the Nutrilotser is that proper tools and guidelines for documentation are missing for different reasons You know, normally you have your visiting your doctor maybe once a month, two times a month, depending on the stage of therapy.
And in between, there is no proper monitoring of the patient's. How the patient is in terms of nutritional aspects overall well feeling all these things are missing so if you go to the doctor for your new next appointment then they are checking all the medical topics but the focus on the nutritional aspects and on the overall well-being is not.
So much in focus for the doctors it only becomes relevant most cases if it's really visible so if the patient is really getting into a very weak into a very bad stage then several cases not in each case unfortunately then the doctor is starting with a topic of malnutrition and then often it's It means that you have to start a nutritional therapy, which is very expensive, because these are then often you directly start with parenteral drugs. You know, these are wee things.
And there you have costs per day for a patient of more than 200 euros. And you can sum it up for the average length of a therapy, which is six months. And then you can see how much the financial impact is of a therapy, parenteral therapy, which was initiated too late.
And here we start with Nutriloetze. For us, it's important that just from the first meeting with the doctor, with all the experts which you have in your oncology first meeting, kickoff meeting, let's call it like this, even if that's tough to say for a patient, kickoff meeting. But anyhow, in general, then you already should start using our app, because then you can monitor just from the start, how does a patient develop in terms of overall well-being,
in terms of nutritional aspects, and so on and so on. And you can... Start with the right treatment or at least get the right awareness for all these aspects Just when it's necessary. So means we we will plan to have a kind of Trachyglide system in the app green is okay everything, Red yellow just look on this start talking to your doctor and if it's red then it's really the right time or the.
Relevant time to really start but with a new therapy, the therapy for nutritional aspects in between to your oncology therapy. And this is what we want to deliver. And the reason is really what is important in terms of the app, whereas the status quo how it's today, is that it's patient-centric. This means the patient is doing the documentation. It's all these things giving in each day in best case. How do I feel? Are there any complications? do have a headache and so on and so on.
And the most relevant topic is giving in his weight. Because one of the key elements of this app to monitor and to judge the status of the patient is a BMI, a well-known BMI. This is a correlation of your weight and your length or how big you are and so on. Then there's a ratio. And if this ratio is unfortunate for you, then you have to start with your whatever necessary therapy. Could you elaborate on the current development stage of Nutriloza and any significant milestones achieved to date?
To date yeah what what is a big milestone yeah i will become part of the team if you consider this as a myself no i think we already proceeded pretty well so we are more more than six months or more than half a year nearly a year already working on on this app on this concept what is the big achievement today yeah we hope to get the first mvp by end of this year beginning of next year because it's a learning also which we made today
here and and before wherever is this is a very untangible topic you know you need the app you need something to show and in best case also.
To have a tool or a proof that this concept is working with patients everything else is just nice theoretical approach but it's hard to to convince really uh investors to give money for something which they unfortunately really cannot make a clear mind of because we are talking here about a very sensitive topic ecology cancer uh which in worst case nobody wants to get involved in because it's not so favorable and in other cases they really do not know really what does it mean what are
the issues how should a idol therapy look like and so on and so on that's why we really came to the conclusion that mvp is really critical also to get new funds and you're currently looking for funding and all partnerships yeah that's a good one this is a good question partnerships i think primarily we're looking for funding that's also why we're here we need money. What strategies are you employing to integrate Nutrilose into existing cancer care practices?
And how are you approaching user acquisition? Yeah, it's... Great topic, but also a great issue. So what does it mean to step one step backwards? So how do we want to get money into the system? I think that's always a key question. So we made the decision that our idea can only fly if we get reimbursement for the product. So it's nothing out of pocket. It's nothing OTC, whatever. We really need reimbursement.
So there are two options to get the reimbursement. these are selective contracts with health insurance companies now which you have to to negotiate deal, health insurance by health insurance to get a reimbursement there or there's the other option to to get a general reimbursement which then would be a kind of these digger i don't know how much you know about these digger digital solutions in health but this is our i would like to say secondary option because digas already have a bad reputation
for different reasons in the market, And to get a really approved DIGA, it's a much longer way to ask whether to get an app which is qualified as a medical device in the first step, class one, and then get the selective reimbursement from individual health insurance companies. So reimbursement is the first thing. And then if there's reimbursement, for sure, the one who has to distribute the app are the doctors, the oncologists, most of them.
So then the second step is really to get this into the standard routines of the oncologist. And here we really have to start in best cases with the first cancer kickoff meeting where the patient and everyone is getting together for the first time and they are talking and defining about the therapy. And then in best cases also we are already part of this procedure. What KPIs are you monitoring to assess the effectiveness of Nutridoce and what outcomes have you observed so far?
So everything which is outcome related, it's just business experience, these are studies, this is whatever, because this concept does not exist so far, except for everything which we have in our mind or where. But there's no real tool. But if it might have been launched in the first stage for us, what is also important, sorry, I forgot this. So the Nutrilose, more or less, has two aspects, the medical one and the financial one.
So we spoke a lot about the medical impact, so medical relevance on how to better monitor it and so on and so on. And then there's also, which I touched a bit in the very beginning, financial aspect, which is mostly related to health insurance companies.
Because as I said, if the awareness for nutritional aspects starts too late, means in a very bad stage, nutritional stage of the patient, then you have to act and spend lots of money into the patient to stabilize or to improve his nutritional, his overall aspects. This costs, as I said, a lot of money for the health insurance. Is cost you more than 200 euros per day for a period of up to three months. So then you can calculate what does it cost per patient, the secondary nutritional therapy.
And here we want to win the health insurance with a message that we say, if you really have a proper monitoring just from the start, you can avoid 10 to 20 percent of those patients.
Which costs you today 600 uh 200 euros per day for three months yeah so this is the other financial aspects and this is our biggest trigger how we want to win health insurance companies because they know uh what it costs they know how tight their budgets are so next to the medical aspects these financial health insurance related uh focus let's call it like this is a main part the whole concept great so only thing left for me to say is good luck on your
startup journey and let us know when you achieve the next milestone we will you can be sure thanks a lot thank you welcome everybody to another interview from the business angel summit here in lovely minds today i'm talking with alexander david from greenable i'm one of the founders awesome can you tell us First, what specific challenges in CO2 footprint calculation does Greenable address and who is your primary target customer?
Usually you have the problem in carbon footprint accounting that is very complex. People are no experts and people do not have time in the companies to actually calculate carbon footprint. So they have to start from scratch and from the beginning. And we do help the customers by providing a software that is intuitive and enable our customers to calculate, reduce and report their carbon footprint.
So our main customers are basically small and medium-sized companies from the steel, plastics and packaging industry, for example. Why do they need to calculate the CO2 footprint? So companies need to calculate the carbon footprint for their products because of the CSRD coming next year and because of the digital product passport coming in 2027. So because of these regulations, companies need to calculate the carbon footprint in the end.
I see so there's a regulatory requirement to prove the carbon footprint exactly especially in scope 3 3.1 3.4 like the supply chain emissions company have to calculate the emissions i see could you elaborate on the current development stage of greenable and any significant milestones achieved today so yeah we founded greenable in 2022 as a company and we started off with the Exist student founders grant and then we closed our pre-suit round last year.
We have currently a team of 12 people. We're based in Kaiserslautern where our offices are and our product is on the market since summer last year already and we have around nine customers on the software that are already paying and using the software right now. For the American audience that is also popularly known as K-Town in the US military. You have a big presence there, right? Yeah, exactly. It's known as K-Town because there's the big airbase in Kaiserslautern. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's very close to it and it's called Rammstein. Exactly, yeah. Do you feel any different because you're not based out of major tech hub? No, actually not because we are like a spin-off from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. So, we have quite a good background and also because we are a spin-off of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. So, that gives us a really solid background in science and also in research.
For everybody who doesn't know, can you tell us just a few sentences about the Research Center for Artificial Intelligence? Yeah, the Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Germany is like basically the institution for AI in Germany. and they have different areas, for example, like innovative factory systems. It's also where I worked before. And this is also dealing with the topic of sustainability.
What is your current funding status? And are you seeking additional funds or partnerships to expand your solution? Yeah, our currently funding status is that we closed the pre-seed round last year in summer. And now we're looking for new funding in 2025. So in the beginning of 2025, and we are looking for potential new investors and partners for our next funding round. What strategies are you employing to integrate Greenable into existing corporate sustainability initiatives?
And how are you approaching customer acquisition? So what we basically do is we try to partner up with other companies, so finding ways together with them to push the topic of sustainability because some companies provide CSRD tools, we provide product carbon footprint. So together that builds quite a good ecosystem and especially within sustainability you have to work together in that case to help the companies that are in need.
Um what what is like in terms of size company size either revenue or employees or both what is your usual customer look like yeah we are usually around a thousand employees also with some companies that are way smaller but also some that are a little bit bigger but yeah the small and medium says the german middle stand is basically the customer base we are aiming at.
And i would assume there are thousands of potential customers in germany alone yeah basically there There are many, many, many companies, more than over a thousand companies that would need a product carbon footprint for their company, for their products. Yeah, as said, regulatory requirements coming in the next years. Exactly. What are the KPIs you are monitoring to assess the effectiveness of Greenable and what outcomes have you observed so far?
So what we are obsessing as KPIs is, of course, the products our customer are calculating their carbon footprint for also the different suppliers they have things like that but also in terms of our sales we are looking at our customer satisfaction scores for example and with that we can always improve the product we can improve the process that we are dealing with and that are some of the kpis we think that are interesting for us did you have in the past already some major customer
feedback that really changed the direction of your product not really the direction but it more or less cleared the way that we were already aiming at because some customers were requiring features that we planned maybe a little bit later in the process and that we just did before now because the customer said yeah it would be good to have not nice to have but would be really good to have so we did that a bit earlier but no major shifts yet okay Great.
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure having you. Thank you. Music. Music.