Happy days at RoBoTec PTC.

Every year, the Sparkasse Bremen, together with the Starthaus Bremen, awards the Bremen start-up prize. This year, 1st place goes to the young company RoBoTec PTC GmbH from Bremen-Borgfeld.

The Bremen start-up prize is endowed with EUR 10,000 in 2021 and is considered the most important award of the state of Bremen for founders and entrepreneurs. Outstanding founders who have been particularly successful in building up a young company are awarded the prize. “We want to give the Bremen founders a stage. Our goal is, among other things, to make a contribution to the positive development of the start-up climate in Bremen,” says Dino Zirwes. The decisive factor is the role model function in the development of new business ideas and in the establishment of a company. Due to the corona pandemic and the associated restrictions, the prize will be awarded again this year, not at the entrepreneur gala with 600 guests, but virtually.

On February 19, 2019 Friederike and Stephan von Rundstedt founded the startup RoBoTec PTC GmbH as managing owners. The entrepreneurial couple have succeeded in automating plant propagation in a unique way. The fully automated processing method for in vitro plants will revolutionize and change the entire agricultural and plant industry.

RoBo®Cut is a complex robot system with laser technology, which uses innovative hardware and software, especially in the field of image processing and artificial intelligence, and which is used to produce ecologically better plants in vitro reliably, automatically and cost-effectively without contact. The sustainable systems from the RoBo®Cut family reduce CO2 emissions worldwide and enable the world's plant propagators to produce locally fairly for their own markets.

"As incredible as the idea sounds, it is logical that it could only be solved by real plant specialists," says the founder Friederike von Rundstedt, who is responsible for research and development. "Without our many years of experience in plant breeding and propagation, we would not have dared to take the step towards developing this highly complex, fully automatic plant propagation system," recalls the horticultural scientist.
Each plant is individually different. Individuality is one of the greatest challenges for automation specialists. "The "Industrial Internet of Things" (IIoT) technology we use creates the possibility of individualized individual pieces "Batch Size One", e.g. to produce plants of the highest quality and still profitably in vitro. We have to react individually to every incoming plant object in the RoBo®Cut. This process succeeds because the system is implanted with the necessary intelligence via deep learning,” adds Stephan von Rundstedt, founder and managing director of RoBoTec PTC. This intelligence is the translation of plant knowledge into software code. In addition to plant knowledge, machine learning is the particular strength of RoBoTec. The startup is now supported by a team of 14 software developers, technicians and project managers.

The patented RoBo®Cut system has already received several awards. Winning the Bremen start-up prize 2021 opens up another opportunity for the startup RoBoTec. The Bremen start-up award is part of the nationwide competition for the German start-up award. Helge Hußmann from Starthaus Bremen advises, in addition to the other finalists Sharemac and WIOQnet, especially the first place winners to apply for the German start-up award: "Our award winners should apply with this innovative business idea and the special sustainable solution. We attribute good chances to them.”