TUM Venture Lab receives 1.4 million euros

The Munich-based BayWa AG Group is investing 1.4 million euros in the TUM's "Food-Agro-Biotech" venture lab.

Partnership in Munich: BayWa AG is supporting the Food-Agro-Biotech (FAB) Venture Lab at the Technical University of Munich with €1.4 million. "For us at BayWa, supporting start-ups is an important contribution to accelerating innovation and putting it into practice," says Klaus Josef Lutz, CEO of the Group, which is active in the agriculture, energy and construction industries worldwide.

The FAB offers a training and incubator program for start-ups in the fields of agriculture, food and biotechnology: "In this important field for the environment and health, we expect forward-looking innovations through the combination of natural and life sciences with artificial intelligence, robotics and sensor technology," says TUM President Thomas Hofmann.

In addition to financial support, the Group and the Venture Lab will also share knowledge. TUM offers start-up teams the infrastructure for laboratory experiments, prototype construction and management on its campus. The aim is not individual start-ups, but "start-up families", as stated in a press release. To this end, TUM establishes contacts in research, with companies and investors: "A key success factor of important innovation locations is their ecosystem, in which the different players complement each other with their strengths, generate dynamism and creativity in interaction and produce something truly new," explains Hofmann.

In addition to the FAB, the TUM Venture Labs Aerospace, Built Environment, ChemSPACE, Healthcare, Quantum, Robotics/AI and Software/AI were launched around a year ago.