Dresden-based Fraunhofer spin-off Senodis Technologies GmbH receives pre-seed funding and prepares the market entry of the CeraCode® marking solution.
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The start-up Senodis Technologies, spun off from Fraunhofer IKTS, and the Fraunhofer Technology Transfer Fund (FTTF) successfully closed their first round of financing at the end of June. The investment is the starting signal for the next steps towards the market launch of Ceracode® marking by Senodis.
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The Ceracode® marking concept has been further developed for use in industrial environments since March 2019 as part of an Exist research transfer project and will be offered to industrial customers in hot forming in the form of a service model. The developed technology concept enables continuous digital component detection at processing temperatures of over 900 °C. In addition to an existing cooperation with a leading manufacturer of press-hardened automotive components, several manufacturers have already expressed interest in the application.
“We are very pleased to welcome FTTF, a financially strong and very well-connected partner, to our team of shareholders. We see the fact that FTTF is committed to an investment in Senodis despite the current situation as a great leap of faith and strong motivation to seize the opportunities in the crisis,” explains Björn Erik Mai, co-founder and managing director of Senodis. “The last few months in particular have shown how important digitization is for making manufacturing processes more flexible and optimizing supply chains for German industry. We are confident that we can make an important contribution to this with our technological solutions. We are convinced that the technological basis that the team of Senodis and Fraunhofer IKTS has created under sometimes very challenging conditions will prove successful in the marketplace.”
Johann C. Siemes, Managing Director of FTTF, summarizes the decision for the pre-seed investment: “In Senodis Technologies we see a very strong team with the right skillset at the interface of hardware and software. Although the start-up is still in a very early phase, they can already clearly present their technological USP. We are pleased that the founders have dared to take the step into spin-off and are now part of our portfolio. Now it’s time to get out of the lab and into the market! Now it’s time for everyone involved to validate the business model on industrial customers and initiate sustainable corporate development.”
The founders and investors are unanimous in their thanks to Prof. Ralf B. Wehrspohn (Executive Board Fraunhofer- Gesellschaft), Prof. Alexander Michaelis (Institute Director Fraunhofer IKTS) and Dr. Christian Wunderlich (Deputy Institute Director Fraunhofer IKTS), who have supported the spin-off process very positively in the sense of the start-up.
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Senodis
Senodis Technologies GmbH in Dresden was spun off from the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS in October 2019 to bring the Ceracode® marking system developed at IKTS to product maturity and to market it. Ceracode® is a marking concept for hot-formed metal components where conventional marking solutions fail due to process temperatures of more than 900 °C. The printing process is based on ceramics. The printing process based on ceramic inks solves this challenge and enables seamless recording of the components along the process chain. Senodis thus provides customers with a reliable and quickly integrable solution for continuous recording of the components, including process data, in the form of a service model.
FTTF
The Fraunhofer Technology Transfer Fund (FTTF) was founded in 2018 and is a venture capital investor focusing on Fraunhofer startups from the pre-seed phase. With a fund volume of 60 million euros, supported by the European Investment Fund (EIF) and the Fraunhofer- Gesellschaft, the FTTF finances young deep-tech companies and stands by the founders as an entrepreneurial partner.
(v.l.n.r.): Björn Erik Mai, Christoph Kroh, Thomas Härtling, Johann Siemes, Marek Rjelka, Thong Le Hoang