The seed investor High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) finances tech start-ups with growth potential and has supported more than 700 start-ups since 2005. With the launch of its fourth fund, HTGF now has about 1.4 billion euros under management. Its team of experienced investment managers and start-up experts support young companies with expertise, entrepreneurial spirit and passion. HTGF’s focus is on high-tech start-ups in the fields of digital tech, industrial tech, life sciences, chemistry and related business areas. To date, external investors have injected about 5 billion euros of capital into the HTGF portfolio via more than 2,000 follow-on financing rounds. In addition, HTGF has already successfully sold shares in more than 170 companies. Fund investors in this public-private partnership include the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, KfW Capital and 45 companies from a wide range of industries. Fund investors in this public-private partnership include the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, KfW Capital and 45 companies from a wide range of industries.

HTGF | High-Tech Gruenderfonds

Founded in 1999, eCAPITAL is an entrepreneur-led venture capital investor focusing on early- and growth-stage deep-tech companies with a positive impact on society. eCAPITAL is based in Germany and invests with its own funds with a total volume of over € 340 million in the areas of Sustainability, Enterprise Software, Cybersecurity, IoT and New Materials. In addition to financial resources, eCAPITAL offers its portfolio companies strategic support and access to an international network of entrepreneurs, scientists, investors and founders and was lead investor in various deep-tech companies such as sonnen, Novaled or Jedox, which were sold very successfully to international corporates or investors.

eCAPITAL ENTREPRENEURIAL PARTNERS

Merck Ventures is the strategic, corporate venture capital arm of Merck. Its mandate is to invest in innovative technologies and products with the potential to significantly impact Merck‘s core business areas. From its headquarters in Amsterdam and offices in the US and Israel we invest globally in transformational ideas driven by great entrepreneurs. Merck Ventures takes an active role in its portfolio companies and teams up with entrepreneurs and co-investors to translate innovation towards commercial success. Merck Ventures has a significant focus on early-stage investing and company creation including the creation of spin-offs to leverage Merck‘s science and technology base.

M Ventures

Imec.xpand is an independently managed, game-changing way to enable early-stage nano electronics-based innovation powered by imec, the world-leading R&D hub for nanoelectronics and digital technology.

imec.xpand

Bosch Ventures (Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH) is the corporate venture capital company of the Bosch Group, a leading global supplier of technology and services. Bosch Ventures invests worldwide in innovative start-up companies at all stages of their development. Its investment activities focus on technology companies working in areas of business of current and future relevance for Bosch, above all, automation and electrification, energy efficiency, enabling technologies, and healthcare systems. Bosch Ventures also invests in services and business models as well as new materials that are relevant to the above-mentioned areas of business. Bosch Ventures invests from EUR 500k for a seed funding to more than EUR 15m per company for usually 10% to 25% equity position. Bosch Ventures prefers to syndicate their investments with existing or new investors in the company and can take the lead as necessary.

Bosch Ventures

TEL Venture Capital firmly believe that their future is built on a foundation of trust. It is essential that they make efficient use of their resources to continue leading the digital age and that they take responsibility to fulfill their promises, without fail. To that end, they are firmly committed to the future success of their customers, shareholders, partners, and local communities.

TEL Venture Capital

SK Hynix is the global leader in producing semiconductor, such as DRAM and NAND flash and System IC including CMOS Image Sensors. Since pilot production of Korea’s first 16Kb SRAM in 1984, SK Hynix consistently led the industry with smaller, faster and lower power semiconductor.

SK Hynix

Ferroelectric Memory Company

FMC is the provider of extremely efficient FeFET memory solutions for non-volatile storage. FeFET is ultra-low-power, high-performance, very dense, and extremely temperature stable. It will scale to transistor sizes ranging from 28nm to 5nm and below. The FMC team has been supported by “EXIST Forschungstransfer”, a program of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The company is based in Dresden, Germany.FMC commercializes a disruptive material innovation that will solve this problem for current and future technology nodes, i.e. eNVM based on ferroelectric hafnium oxide (FE-HfO2). The unexpected physical effect of ferroelectricity in HfO2 allows for the transformation of classical high-k metal-gate (HKMG) transistors into nonvolatile ferroelectric field effect transistors (FeFET). In this way, MCUs can easily be scaled from e.g. 65 nm down to 28 nm and beyond enabling tremendous advantages for the overall system: SoC cost reduction of around 80%, per bit write energy reduction by a factor of 1000 and an overall performance gain of the system of around 70% due to the transition to advanced process nodes. Due to the close relation of FeFET and CMOS baseline, there is no roadblock for FMC’s technology to be applied to cutting-edge technology nodes like 22 nm FDSOI, 1X nm FinFET and beyond.

<div>Headquartered in Germany, Ferroelectric Memory GmbH (FMC) provides ferroelectric hafnium oxide non-volatile memory chips for semiconductor and fabless manufacturers. This benefits Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including those at the edge, as the chips enable products like microcontrollers (small computers on integrated chips) to improve their speed and capability.</div>

Generating, collecting, and analyzing enterprise data will never be the same.

Edge Computing

<div>
 
 Headquartered in Germany, Ferroelectric Memory GmbH (FMC) provides ferroelectric hafnium oxide non-volatile memory chips for semiconductor and fabless manufacturers. This benefits Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including those at the edge, as the chips enable products like microcontrollers (small computers on integrated chips) to improve their speed and capability.
 
 
 The company claims its chips offer fast switching, ultra-low power and scalability enhancements over competitors. The chips are suitable for a range of applications including IoT, consumer electronics, automotive, medical, and aerospace. FMC also works with semiconductor companies and foundries in the US, Europe, and Asia.&nbsp;
 
 
 In November 2020, FMC raised USD 20 million in Series B funding to accelerate the commercialization of its artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and embedded memory applications, among others. The company also intends to expand the team at its Dresden headquarters and begin expanding internationally to the US and Asian markets.
 
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DC Blox offers edge colocation centers, including disaster recovery services, mainly targeting the underserved markets in the southeastern region of the US. Its clients range from enterprises, cloud providers, government entities, and educational institutions, among others. DC Blox connects users to any destination globally through its private network and ecosystem of global communication partners.DC BLOX’s data centers are located in Birmingham, AL; Huntsville, AL; Chattanooga, TN; Greenville, SC, and Myrtle Beach, SC, with others in development near Atlanta and Berkeley County, SC as of March 2024.In 2023, DC Blox embarked on an <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dc-blox-set-build-hyperscale-133500449.html">expansion strategy</a>, with the development of a hyperscale-ready data center campus in Rockdale County, Georgia, being one of the latest and most significant projects. This new campus was set to feature a sprawling 750,000 sq ft space with a total power capacity of 216MW, supplied by Georgia Power. The project was designed to include a dark fiber ring around the Atlanta metropolitan area, enhancing the connectivity for its tenants and bolstering the company's network infrastructure.Funding and financialsDC Blox raised USD 187 million in funding from Post Road Group and Bain Capital Credit, in March 2021. It aims to use the funds to refinance existing credit facilities, add liquidity to its balance sheet, and expand data center capacity in new and existing locations.

DC Blox

Edgeworx offers the Eclipse ioFog Engine, an application platform that turns hardware into an intelligent edge node. The company allows users to extend their cloud to the edge and run and monitor microservices from any infrastructure. It caters to both developers and operations users to uniformly manage hardware and software.In November 2023, Edgeworx, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/728459">launched Edgeworx Cloud</a>, an enterprise-grade edge computing platform, on the Google Cloud Marketplace. The platform enables enterprises to deploy and manage containerized edge applications from any network without needing to operate their own Kubernetes clusters. It provides secure data management across edge devices, micro-services, hosts, and clients, as well as a hardware-agnostic agent for synchronizing deployments of heterogeneous fleets.Key customers and partnershipsEdgeworx's technology benefits from a range of partners including Docker, Kubernetes, Microsoft, and Red Hat, among others.

Edgeworx

Crosser offers a real-time analytics platform for enterprise Internet of Things (IoT), primarily for industrial IoT (IIoT).The Crosser Platform enables real-time processing of streaming or batch data, to enable industrial IoT, data transformation, analytics, automation, and integration, all to improve the utilization of industrial assets. The platform moves machine data into the cloud while also enabling edge analytics, hybrid integration, and factory floor integration.Key customers and partnershipsCrosser has a robust portfolio of partnerships with leading technology, AI, and ML providers. Some of its notable partners are AWS, Microsoft, SAP, Agora, Oracle, IFS, Siemens, ZEDEDA, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn March 2021, Crosser raised EUR 3 million (~USD 3.6 million) in Venture funding led by NTT DOCOMO Ventures and Montan-Ventures-Saar, with existing investors Industrifonden, Spintop Ventures, 42 Cap, Almi Invest, and Norrlandsfonden also participating.

Crosser

Zededa was founded in 2016 and came out of stealth in 2018 to offer an open edge ecosystem to provide visibility, control, and security when deploying apps remotely on the edge, regardless of the hardware used. The company commercially launched its remote management software in January 2021. The platform allows developers to avoid vendor lock-in and additionally offers support for industries facing more complex edge applications. Moreover, Zededa allows enterprises to mix old and new technology seamlessly, making it for industries like surveillance. The red company has an office in Pune, India, in addition to its headquarters in San Jose, California.In July 2023, the company released a suite of edge application tools including “Edge Access,” which provides access controls and audit tracing for edge deployments. Users can remotely access edge devices from any location at any time without requiring backend configuration or specialized skills.<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/24108">In November 2023,</a> the company announced a new service named ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service, offering a fully managed Kubernetes service for distributed edge.Key customers and partnershipsThe company has a substantial customer base, with numerous Fortune 500 enterprises spanning various industries like manufacturing, renewable energy, telecommunications, and healthcare. Prominent clients include Rockwell Automation, Emerson, Agora, and VMware.Zededa collaborates with leading technology firms through its global ZEDEDA marketplace, granting partners direct entry to edge operations teams. This marketplace facilitates swift scalability for customers across thousands of edge devices with one-click deployments, eliminating the need for extensive professional services. Notable partners encompass Microsoft, Suse, Juniper Networks, AWS, Rafay Systems, Aviatrix, Fortinet, and more.Through Zededa's technology partnerships, customers can procure hardware devices and have them shipped directly to their intended destinations. This adaptable approach reduces solution expenses and empowers technology providers to offer optimal value to their clientele. Noteworthy partners in this initiative comprise Dell, Supermicro, HP Enterprise, Equinix, and others.During 2023, Zededa collaborated with Applied Digital in August, a company specializing in advanced digital infrastructure for High-Performance Computing, to use ZEDEDA's management and orchestration software. In May, it also partnered with Avassa, a container management platform tailored for edge environments, to facilitate comprehensive orchestration across the entire stack, ensuring security and visibility from hardware to edge applications.Zededa is also a part of multiple industry consortiums to use edge computing to address emerging issues faced by the energy industry. These collaborations include the OSDU Forum as well as LF Energy and Project Alvarium, which are part of the Linux Foundation (a non-profit group to standardize and support the adoption of Linux). In December 2022, the company extended its partnership with Emerson to integrate its edge application management and orchestration solution into Emerson’s DeltaV automation system. This would in turn enable Emerson’s customers to extend this automation system into the distributed edge.Funding and financialsIn <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/26448">February 2024</a>,it raised USD 72 million in a Series C funding round led by Smith Point Capital, with participation from Hillman Company, LDV Partners, Endeavor Catalyst Fund, Juniper Networks, and others. The funds were directed toward expanding sales and marketing endeavors and speeding up R&amp;D.In January 2023, the company announced that it had grown its annual revenue growth by 300%, and nodes under management by 250% over the previous year.

Zededa

SmartCone Technologies Canadian company specializes in developing Internet of Things (IoT) based safety and monitoring solutions.It mainly offers its services for securing dangerous worksites, controlling bicycle lane traffic, managing vehicle fleets, monitoring traffic incident scenes, crowd control, and site security surveillance, among others. Its devices range from wearables and torches, to constellation positioning systems.In July 2022 SmartCone Technologies announced HeatGuardian, a spin-off company dedicated to providing applications and micro-climate weather stations to calculate localized heat exposure to aid individuals and workers in staying safe during periods of hot weather. This initiative was undertaken in partnership with the Human and Environmental Physiology Research Unit at the University of Ottawa.Key customers and partnershipsThe company mainly caters to customers in the mining, logistics, and energy industries. Some notable customers are Nokia, IBM, DHL, and Exelon.In November 2021, the company partnered with the Centre for Integrated Transportation and Mobility (CITM) to build a database architecture and platform that would capture data from all Smart Mobility Networks, both 4G &amp; 5G elements, Intelligent IoT Nodes, C-V2X device, IoT devices, and other sensors installed on the Smart Mobility Networks.In January 2021, AutoGuardian by SmartCone became one of 37 firms in automotive company AISIN Group’s “open innovation initiatives.” This was in response to AutoGuardian’s successful proof of concept relating to vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology. AutoGuardian uses a SmartConeTM device, equipped with a camera, AI, radar, and onboard edge computing to offer non-line-of-sight alerts by using data such as vehicle speeds, vehicle and pedestrian count, and behavior estimations.Funding and financialsIn April 2019, Smartcone received CAD 187,500 in Debt Financing backed by FedDev Ontario.

SmartCone Technologies

Companies that provide software to enable users to run their applications at the edge.

Companies that produce hardware and infrastructure such as routers and servers that are not embedded on devices.

Companies that provide software that facilitates analytics, cyber security, and IoT at the edge.

Companies that produce embeddable hardware, including microchips, that allow devices to transmit and process data.

Companies that provide software used in data centers to carry out operations effectively.

Companies that offer datacenter infrastructure to facilitate edge computing, including micro data centers deployable to more strategic locations.

Some players in the embedded hardware segment offer microprocessors for running GenAI applications at the edge of enterprise networks

Most companies operating in this industry operate under a B2B SaaS model

Includes companies that support AI/ML workloads and offer IoT data management

All companies in this industry offer edge computing solutions

Offers solutions for managing IoT device data on the edge of users' networks

Includes micro processor manufacturers that particularly target AI workloads for the edge

Many service providers partner with telecom services to leverage 5G to reduce edge application latency

Ferroelectric Memory Company

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