Hamburg Founder's Prize awarded

The start-ups Ankerkraut and Beagle Systems have won prizes, the founder of the Cartoflex group of companies was honoured for his life's work.

The winners of the Hamburg Founder's Prize have been announced: The start-ups Beagle Systems, Ankerkraut and the entrepreneur Karl-Heinz Hebrok have been honoured in the categories Start-up, Up-and-Coming and Lifetime Achievement. Initiators were the Hamburger Sparkasse and the Hamburger Abendblatt, the award was handed over in the Fischauktionshalle.

The winner in the start-up category was the drone developer Beagle Systems. If they had taken a different turn when founding their company, they would never have received the prize from Hamburg: Because the founders first considered setting up their company in Shanghai, where two of them met. In the end, Oliver Lichtenstein, Jerry Tang and Mitja Wittersheim decided on Hamburg and developed their first prototype in a stable in Quickborn. Beagle Systems develops long-range drones that can be used for infrastructure inspection or medical transport, for example. The start-up has received permission from four German states to fly the drones, and they are controlled from the Hamburg office, where the ten-strong team is based.

Ankerkraut has become known throughout Germany through its participation in the show Die Höhle der Löwen. Frank Thelen invested and Ankerkraut's spices moved into grocery stores across Germany. Last fall, the founding couple Anne and Stefan Lemcke sold 20 percent of their shares to the investor EMZ for a double-digit million sum. The team of over 170 employees works at four locations in and around Hamburg. At the Hamburg Founder's Prize, Ankerkraut won in the category of up-and-comers.

The last category of the Hamburg Founders' Prize did not go to a company, but to Karl-Heinz Hebrok for his life's work. He founded the Cartoflex group of companies, which operates at three locations in Lüneburg, Bad Oldesloe and Hamburg with five companies in the packaging sector. Today Cartoflex supplies more than 1,200 customers, 200 employees work for the group.