Meshcapade receives Max Planck Founding Prize

The prize is still completely new: the Max Planck Society and the Stifterverband want to use it to promote the start-up culture in science.

The Tübingen-based start-up Meshcapade has been awarded the Max Planck Start-up Prize by the Stifterverband. The company has developed a technology to automatically create 3D figures of people more precisely and realistically. Data sources such as images, sensor-based devices and body measurements are to be used for this. The prize money that the company will now receive is 50,000 euros.

The result when the technology is applied: Avatars that have their own facial expressions and can reproduce subtle gestures and realistic movements. They are compatible with all common 3D visualization programs. The technology is primarily aimed at the fashion, gaming and film industries. However, according to the founders, it also has enormous potential in medicine and healthcare. The reason for this is that it can recreate real, lifelike people in 3D.

The company has been operating in the Max Planck context for a long time: founders Naureen Mahmood, Talha Zaman and Michael Black launched it in 2018 from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. Black is Director at the Institute, Mahmood is CEO of the company, which now has around 15 employees. "We are really proud to be the winning team of the Stifterverband's first new Max Planck Start-up Award," she says: "This means a lot to us and will hopefully bring us even more attention for our great technology."

The Stifterverband initiative of companies and foundations supported the redesign of the original science prize for research. The prize will be awarded to the winning team on June 21, 2022 in Berlin. From now on, it will be awarded every two years to a successful spin-off from the Max Planck Society. A jury chaired by Klaus Blaum, Vice President of the Max Planck Society, will then select the winning team from the applications received.