White-blue and alpine – Munich is popular with high-tech founders
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Zalando, Lieferando, Gorillas – well-known online companies are based in Berlin. The capital is particularly strong when it comes to shopping and marketing. However, founders who are working on artificial intelligence, robots or other advanced technologies feel more comfortable in southern Germany.
Mmunich, the start-up metropolis Berlin continues to lag behind when it comes to technology start-ups. The Technical University of Munich plays a central role here, from which a particularly large number of start-ups emerge. This is shown by a study by the venture capitalist Morphais, which is available to WELT AM SONNTAG in advance.
In it, the Berliners analyze those German start-ups of the past year in which new technological ideas are at the core of the business model. The start-up scene uses the term deep tech for start-ups that deal with things like artificial intelligence (AI), robots or drones.
Almost a quarter of deep tech founders started in Bavaria in 2022. “The TU Munich is a great example of how start-ups can be promoted in a targeted manner,” said Morphais boss Eva-Valérie Gfrerer. The UnternehmerTUM start-up center has been active at the university for years. According to the investor, it helps founders with a technical background to implement their business ideas from a business point of view.
At 19 percent, Berlin is only the second strongest deep-tech location. There is a strong start-up ecosystem in the federal capital, but more often with ideas that are more marketing-driven. The industrial locations of Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia follow in third and fourth place for Deep Tech.
It is striking that the crisis resulting from the Ukraine war in 2022 apparently did not deter the founders: 275 new deep-tech start-ups were created that year – significantly more than in previous years due to the AI boom. And this despite the fact that there is definitely a lull in the entire start-up scene: the number of all new start-ups founded fell from 3290 in 2021 to just 2402 in 2022.
However, when it came to the venture capital collected, the situation also looked worse for the technology founders than in the start-up boom year 2021. The volume fell from 4.2 to 2.4 billion dollars – but was still slightly above the value of 2020. Gfrerer saw this as a return to more realistic company valuations.
There were larger financing rounds for the software provider Celonis, the air taxi developer Volocopter and the hydrogen start-up Hy2Gen. However, the German founders have recently fallen behind their French counterparts in financial terms. The gap between Europe and the US, on the other hand, has narrowed – but only because venture capital has fallen even more sharply in the US than in Europe.