Craftomatic and Textada get Exist grant

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

The University of Konstanz's start-up initiative "Kilometer1" advises and accompanies two start-ups in the start-up phases, which have now received the Exist start-up grant. This was initiated by the German 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, for example, with the application for the Exist grant.

One of the companies, Craftomatic, aims to ensure fair and transparent time evaluation for outside work assignments. Physicist Anna Brückner founded the start-up together with computer scientist Ivan Kostov. Through the grant, they now receive 105,000 euros, and 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 attendance checks using GPS," says Anna Brückner. "This makes working hours fair and transparent, both for the employee and the employer." She says the feedback from the university and the startup initiative helped her with the application process in particular. "We have access to a large network this way."

The second funded company is called Textada and aims to automate time-consuming text analyses. It was founded by computer scientist Felix Hamborg, "Social and Economic Data Science" expert Franziska Weeber and computer scientist Moritz Bock. The company receives 141,000 euros through the Exist grant. Their mentor is junior professor of Data and Information Mining Andreas Spitz. The software of the three founders is intended to help with the annotation of texts. This is because computer scientists often needed a lot of time to mark text passages with predefined categories so that the information they contain can be used. The software is intended 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 as well as graduates can apply for the Exist start-up scholarship up to five years after their graduation. The funding amount includes stipends for the founders as well as material and coaching resources.