Our start-ups BexBioTec, greEnCAP, and AgriBluBio presented themselves at the Hannover Messe 2022

This year’s Hannover Messe, the world’s leading industrial fair, was organised under the motto “Let’s Create the Industry of Tomorrow”. The Kompetenznetzwerk Umweltwirtschaft NRW (KNUW) had invited us to present our existing and planned start-ups at their booth, along with eight other start-ups from North Rhine-Westphalia. Our alumna Dr. Rebecca Melcher, CEO of BexBioTec, and her colleagues Dr. Ronja Kossack and Moritz Nickels, had one stand; our alumnae Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar and Dr. Carolin Richter, co-founders of greEnCAP, and our alumna Dr. Anne Vortkamp, co-founder of AgriBluBio, shared another one. They were shortly joined on Monday and Tuesday by Prof. Bruno Moerschbacher. BexBioTec offers customized bioassays for the rapid quantification of biostimulant activities to industry which is developing or marketing agro-biologic products; AgriBluBio will market our well-defined, phytostimulatory second generation chitosans, initially for agricultural applications; and greEnCAP will combine these chitosans with bioactive plant extracts to further broaden their efficacy using their encapsulation technology. Together, we hope that we can contribute to the urgently required transition to a more sustainable agriculture which makes less use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Bruno, Rebecca, Ronja, and Sruthi were also invited to an on-stage discussion with representatives of the Ministry for Environment, Agriculture, Conservation and Consumer Protection of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MULNV), to highlight problems and solutions when trying to bring research results into the markets. As part of the invitation by KNUW, MULNV had also sponsored short video trailers to our start-ups, one for BexBioTec and one for greEnCAP and AgriBluBio. We are sure our participation at Hannover Messe will boost the development of our young start-ups, and we are looking forward to their successes!