Tech Discovery Conference 2024
How can tech help companies meet the challenges of our time? We invite you to an inspirational day full of learnings, insights, and success stories by academic, industrial, and technological thought leaders - completely free for our partners.
April 25th 2024 - Munich | 09:00 - 17:00 | Highlight Towers Design Offices, Tower 1, 32.OG
Welcome to Discovery 2024
Our full-day Tech Discovery conference will take place on April 25th at Highlight Towers, Tower 1, 32.OG in Munich. Our goal is to exchange ideas and knowledge with the brightest minds in the german deep tech industry. Inspired by our own internal hackathon, our Tech Discovery Conference is an exclusive event focusing on expert-level tech and business discussions.
This event is a must for innovation enthusiasts and decision-makers who want to stay ahead of the curve and find practical solutions for real-world problems. Come along to share opinions, and build lasting relationships.
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Highlight Towers, Tower 1, 32.OG | Design Offices
Mies-van-der-Rohe-Straße 6, 80807 München
Agenda 2024:
Time |
Topic |
9:00 |
GetIn & Coffee |
10:00 |
Welcome - Zièd Bahrouni, CEO at Motius & Founding Partner of Spacewalk VC |
10:15 |
Agility in safety critical systems: From autonomous cars at Tesla to autonomous trains at Futurail - Alexandre Haag Co-Founder & CEO at Futurail, Ex-Lead Tesla Autopilot |
10:45 |
The Castle of Success - A Thought Model to start up Innovations in Corporate Structures - Dr. Stefan Kampmann, Ex-CTO Voith & Osram, DeepTech Advisor |
11:15 |
Break |
11:45 |
Birds of a feather flock together? Research Insights from Startup investing - Hana Milanov, Professor of Entrepreneurship at TUM, academic director of the EMBA in Innovation and Business Creation and CDTM Board member |
12:15 |
Encrypted Computing, Creating insights from data that you don’t have - Roderick Rodenburg, CEO & Founder at Roseman Labs |
12:45 |
Lunch Break |
14:30 |
Bringing Lithium-Ion Battery Waste „tozero“ - Ksenija Milicevic Neumann, Co-Founder & CTO at tozero |
15:00 |
How AI is changing software development and R&D - Zièd Bahrouni, CEO at Motius & Founding Partner of Spacewalk VC |
15:30 |
Break |
16:00 |
Podium Discussion: What has changed in DeepTech Startups/Investments over the last 2 years?
|
16:30 |
Workshop I: Shifting from drug discovery to drug engineering - How biophysics and AI are changing the development of next generation medicines - Jacob Halatek, Founder & CTO at Bioleap, Ex-MicrosoftWorkshop II: Breaking the compute-memory bottleneck - Manu Nair, CEO & Founder at Synthara |
17:30 |
Closing & After Drinks - Zièd Bahrouni, CEO at Motius & Founding Partner of Spacewalk VC |
Speakers 2024:
Dr. Stefan Kampmann
Ex-CTO Voith & Osram, DeepTech Advisor
Dr. Stefan Kampmann is a graduate physicist and a PhD engineer. For over 20 years, Stefan has been deeply involved with combustion engines, electronics, semiconductors, and MEMS sensors in development, manufacturing, and technical sales at Bosch, where he served as Executive Vice President for Automotive Electronics, EVP for Electromobility, and ultimately EVP for Powertrain, among other roles. As CTO at Osram, he was responsible for transitioning from conventional light sources like halogen and xenon to LED. In his capacity as CTO at Voith, he drove digitalization and innovation projects for new revenue streams, such as H2 tank systems for fuel cell trucks and energy storage for stationary solutions with redox flow batteries. Stefan has been leveraging this profound domain expertise since December 2023 as an Innovation and DeepTech Advisor at &alwaysahead.
Alexandre Haag
Co-Founder & CEO at Futurail, Ex-Lead Tesla Autopilot
Alexandre Haag is one of the leading European experts in autonomous driving. Over the years, Alex has developed strong experience in taking innovative ideas and transforming them into products. He has a passion for software intelligence applied to physical systems and good, simple engineering. Alex holds an M.Sc. from MIT and Ecole Polytechnique, France, and started his career in the robotics industry. He then built up an impressive track record in the field of autonomous driving. First as a key lead in the Tesla Autopilot team, then as CTO and Managing Director at Autonomous Intelligent Driving GmbH, and finally as VP of OEM Relations at Argo. In 2022, Alex decided to focus on Futurail, a venture that can abate 10MtCO² per year.
Ksenija Milicevic Neumann
Co-Founder & CTO at tozero
Ksenija started as a Senior Research Advisor & Startup Scout at the IME Institute for Metallurgy and Metal Recycling at RWTH Aachen University, where she worked on multiple projects related to sustainable production and recycling of metals and acquired millions of dollars in R&D grants. Prior to her Post-Doc position at the IME, she was the R&D Manager and Safety Officer at startup Maana Electric, where she created the intellectual property for the production of solar cells on the moon. Ksenija holds PhD from RWTH Aachen University in electrochemistry and has deep technical knowledge and experience in STEM.
Jacob Halatek
Founder & CTO at Bioleap, Ex-Microsoft
Jacob is a co-founder at Bioleap and a passionate biophysicist. Following a PhD and Postdoc at the LMU Munich where he developed novel predictive models to engineer complex biological systems, he joined the Biological Computation Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge to work on collaborations with big pharma and build a platform for synthetic biology. He then joined Oxford Biomedica to build and lead the first computational group at the company, introducing quantitative modeling into the R&D process of complex cell & gene therapies. At Bioleap, he has built a first-of-its-kind solution to integrate AI with biophysical modeling, enabling model-driven R&D of complex therapies on a systems level for the first time.
Hana Milanov
Professor of Entrepreneurship at TUM, academic director of the EMBA in Innovation and Business Creation, and CDTM Board member
Before her current position, Hana Milanov served as TUM Senior Vice President for Internationalization and Alumni and was a member of the EU Horizon 2020 Advisory Committee for Future Emerging Technologies. Prior to TUM, Hana was a professor at IE Business School, where she currently serves as a Visiting Faculty member. Recognized among Germany's top 20 professors supporting entrepreneurship in 2023, she has received multiple awards for her research and teaching. Her research is focused on how entrepreneurs acquire resources and its impact on opportunity exploitation and performance, with a focus on gender dynamics. Beyond academia, Hana supports innovation as an advisory board member at Spacewalk VC.
Roderick Rodenburg
CEO & Founder at Roseman Labs
Roderick Rodenburg blends profound engineering expertise with a strong entrepreneurial mindset. Following a decade-long tenure at Unilever, Roderick embarked on a path of entrepreneurship initiating multiple data-collaboration platforms. Roderick is co-founder and CEO of Roseman Labs, a start-up specializing in sensitive data collaboration that received Spacewalk VC funding in 2023. Roderick will talk about computing on encrypted data and how new data sources can be unlocked by protecting data-privacy.
Manu Nair
CEO & Founder at Synthara
Manu is passionate about building a future where Artificial Intelligence is ubiquitous by developing next-generation, fast, and energy-efficient processing systems, while ensuring they are easy to use and integrate well for customers. To make this vision real, he founded the Swiss company Synthara in 2019 alongside Dr. Alessandro Aimar, based on their doctoral work at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH Zürich and the University of Zürich. His experience in the industry spans more than 10 years, including companies such as Analog Devices and Apical Imaging.
Marie Tai
Principal at Possible Ventures | deeptech VC
Marie is a Principal at Possible Ventures, an early stage deeptech fund with a global investment mandate. As an educated chemist / chemical engineer from ETH and TUM with research experience from MIT and Stanford, Marie has been investing in deeptech for Goldman Sachs, Hitachi Ventures, and BMW i Ventures; notable investments include: Sophia Genetics (IPO on NASDAQ 2021), Scipher Medicine, ArsenalBio, Huma, Zafrens, Pow.bio and Sensible, Entheos, Opto, Akhetonics, etc.
Dr.-Ing. Herbert Mangesius
General Partner at Vsquared Ventures | Co-Founder of 1E9 Denkfabrik
Herbert is a founding partner at Vsquared Ventures. He was also part of the founding team of the predecessor fund Vito Ventures. Prior to working in the venture capital industry Herbert was a researcher with the LadHyX at École Polytechnique in Paris, the Large Graphs and Networks Group at UCL in Louvain-la-Neuve, and the Information-Oriented Control Group at TUM in Munich. He is trained in mechanical and aerospace engineering and an alumnus of the technology management program at the CDTM in Munich. Together with the former WIRED Germany lead team he is also co-founder of the 1E9 Denkfabrik, running an online magazine and tech conferences with the Deutsches Museum and Blitz Club in Munich.
Veronika Wax
CEO & Co-Founder at Demodesk
Veronika is the founder and CEO of Demodesk and uses her AI software to help companies analyze sales calls and automate manual processes to make sales teams more productive. She raised €15M in venture capital for her company, won the top prize in the German start-up competition in 2018 and was accepted to the world's most renowned start-up accelerator Y Combinator in Silicon Valley in 2019. In 2022, she was voted one of the top 50 German female entrepreneurs by Handelsblatt. Before Demodesk, she worked as a project manager at Bain & Company in the USA and Germany and studied at TU Munich, CDTM and Columbia University in New York. In her private life, she is involved as a mentor for young founders, for startup-friendly policies in Germany and as a business angel.
Zièd Bahrouni
CEO at Motius & Founding Partner of Spacewalk VC
Zièd Bahrouni is CEO and co-founder of Motius R&D and an active member of research groups in the area of adaptive networks and their applications in social networks and artificial intelligence. He is also a partner in the deeptech fund Spacewalk VC and a member of several advisory boards in Germany.
Impressions from Tech Discovery Conference 2023:
Some of the Tech Discovery Conference 2023 Speakers:
Dr. Dr. Hamid Noori
CEO at The Cultivated B
Andreas Mauer
VP CTO & Chief Architect at Bosch Building Technologies
Lisa Oberaigner
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Emidat
Gregor Gimmy
Founder at 27pilots
Dr. Carlos Härtel
CTO at Climeworks, Chairman of the University Council at Munich University of Applied Sciences
