Craftomatic and Textada get Exist grant

One company has designed a digital time clock, the other automates text analyses. Both are advised by the University of Konstanz's start-up initiative and have now received the grant from the Ministry of Health.

The University of Konstanz's start-up initiative "Kilometer1" advises and supports two start-ups in the founding phase, which have now received the Exist start-up grant. This was initiated by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, Energy and Climate Protection and is co-financed by the European Social Fund. The university's program works closely with the young companies and helped with the application for the Exist grant, for example.

One of the companies, Craftomatic, aims to ensure fair and transparent time evaluation for work assignments outside the company. Physicist Anna Brückner founded the start-up together with computer scientist Ivan Kostov. They will now receive 105,000 euros through the scholarship; their mentor at the university is Professor of Computer Vision and Image Analysis Bastian Goldlücke. "We are developing a digital time clock for the construction site with an attendance check using GPS," says Anna Brückner. "This makes working hours fair and transparent, both for the employee and the employer." The feedback from the university and the start-up initiative helped her in particular with the application process. "We have access to a large network."

The second funded company is called Textada and aims to automate time-consuming text analysis. It was founded by computer scientist Felix Hamborg, social and economic data science expert Franziska Weeber and computer scientist Moritz Bock. The company is receiving 141,000 euros from the Exist grant. Their mentor is Andreas Spitz, Junior Professor of Data and Information Mining. The software developed by the three founders is intended to help with the annotation of texts. This is because computer scientists often need a lot of time to mark text passages with predefined categories so that the information they contain can be used. The software is designed to relieve them of this work. To do this, the founding team uses modern AI techniques, suggests further annotations based on a few manual annotations - and can apparently even annotate independently once the AI reaches a certain quality.

All university members and graduates can apply for the Exist start-up grant up to five years after graduation. The funding amount includes grants for the founders as well as material and coaching resources.