Plug and Play EXPO: Meeting place for international startups
It was a special day for the Scaleup Landing Pad program: seven of the international startups supported by it there were on site in Hamburg. On October 27, Plug and Play, active worldwide as an accelerator and innovation platform, hosted an EXPO at the Factory Hammerbrooklyn, focusing on hydrogen and logistics.
Logistics and hydrogen - two key topics in Hamburg
Plug and Play, which originated in California, now has over 45 locations on four continents. Ten new ones were added in 2022 alone. The innovation platform has been represented in Hamburg since 2019, initially with a focus on logistics. In the meantime, there is also the H2 Startup Accelerator, which promotes innovations in the field of hydrogen. Green hydrogen is seen as the energy carrier of the future and Hamburg is aiming for a leading role here, as Economics Senator Michael Westhagemann emphasized in his welcoming speech.
SunGreenH2 takes production of green hydrogen to a new level
Several startups from the Scaleup Landing Pad have also dedicated themselves to the topic of hydrogen. The funding program aims to attract young international companies, that are already beyond the initial startup phase and targeting strong growth, to Hamburg as a location. Tulika Raj from Singapore had the longest journey. She represented SunGreenH2, which manufactures electrolysers that can produce green hydrogen much more cheaply, environmentally friendly and energy efficient than conventional devices. There is a very good chance that Hamburg will become the company's European production site.
HySiLabs facilitates transport of hydrogen
SunGreenH2 presented at a hydrogen pitch, as did HySiLabs from France, which took first place in the audience vote. Until now, it has been a considerable challenge to transport hydrogen safely over longer distances in larger quantities. HySiLabs has found a solution to this and plans to carry out a pilot project in Hamburg. An important factor here is the port, which is at the heart of the business models of some of the scaleups from the program.
Hamburg offers many location advantages
UTURN from the Netherlands, for example, offers a marketplace for container transports that is used via an app. The company even has an office in Hamburg already and wants to establish itself here in the long term. awake.ai from Finland is not yet that far along, but the business model of using artificial intelligence to optimize port management should attract enough interest in the Hanseatic city to find the ideal partner to scale up with. Proximity to Scandinavia is attractive to the Swiss company Flyability. It builds drones that can perform inspection flights on dangerous places such as nuclear power plants and save money in the process. Flyability is considering a branch in Germany and could cover the Nordic countries just from Hamburg. What results from the Scaleup Landing Pad Hamburg program, which in its first run will run until the end of the year, will continuously be a topic on startup city hamburg!
CO2OPT prevails in the logistics pitch
The official part of the EXPO was concluded by another pitch, in which eight startups from the logistics industry presented themselves, including two from Hamburg. repath helps companies to better deal with the unavoidable risks posed by climate change. Extreme weather events can cause considerable problems, especially in logistics, and repath provides forecasts based on around 50 climate models. In the public vote, CO2OPT received the most support. This startup determines the optimal tires for each truck transport. This allows fuel consumption to be noticeably reduced and thus also CO2 emissions.
