The Need for Speed

The famous line “I feel the need, the need for speed” was spo­ken in a very cav­a­lier and risk-ori­ented way in the movie Top Gun.  How­ever, for star­tups it is often the case that speed actu­ally reduces risk and greatly increases the prob­a­bil­ity of ulti­mate success.

We recently viewed a video show­ing a car trav­el­ing at var­i­ous speeds over a large pot­hole.  At the slow­est speed of 30km/h the car was severely jolted, dam­aged and nearly flipped on its side.  At increas­ing speeds, the dam­age was actu­ally reduced and at 120km/h the car sailed over the pot­hole with barely a notice­able shim­mer.  We rec­og­nized an impor­tant anal­ogy to star­tups and their need to attain a cer­tain speed to suc­cess­fully tra­verse all the dan­gers than can befall a young company.

Fore­most, we often observe that star­tups which move quickly gen­er­ate sig­nif­i­cantly more oppor­tu­ni­ties than those that are dri­ving in an overly cau­tious man­ner.  If a startup only has so much time on the road and it does not know at which high­way exit it will find its next big oppor­tu­nity, it is log­i­cal that the more exits the startup reaches, the higher the like­li­hood of achiev­ing suc­cess (or at least the next impor­tant mile­stone on the journey).

One clas­sic hin­drance to speed occurs when a startup spends an inor­di­nate amount of time and energy on a sin­gle project for a large cus­tomer.  These seem­ingly flat­ter­ing projects can often be pot­holes in dis­guise, and if a startup works through the project too slowly (per­haps by exten­sively cus­tomiz­ing its core offer­ing to meet the needs of this one client) it can veer off its path, miss other valu­able oppor­tu­ni­ties, and, con­se­quently, suf­fer exten­sive damage.

A clas­sic ana­logue of this hin­drance is a startup work­ing too long on its ini­tial prod­uct before putting it in cus­tomers´ hands and receiv­ing feed­back.  The slow work to per­fect the prod­uct prior to (beta)launch is much more dam­ag­ing to the com­pany than receiv­ing dis­sat­is­fied early reviews of an MVP, which are incred­i­bly valu­able to a startup and can help guide it into the fast lane.

Another com­mon way in which star­tups often need to move faster is with their per­son­nel deci­sion-mak­ing.  Instead of expend­ing too much time try­ing to improve employ­ees who do not fit well, star­tups gen­er­ally need to sep­a­rate from under­per­form­ing employ­ees more quickly and should expect to test mul­ti­ple peo­ple in order to sus­tain­ably fill roles.  Often star­tups try to reduce the risk of being slowed down by wrong hires by screen­ing more restric­tively; how­ever, in a tal­ent-con­strained envi­ron­ment, this approach also pre­vents star­tups from attain­ing the veloc­ity needed to power for­ward and effec­tively cruise over problems.

Cen­tral to all the above exam­ples (and many more that are not listed) are the ben­e­fits of the men­tal­ity that comes with dri­ving faster.  When dri­ving faster, one must be more alert and there is no time to waste on annoy­ing issues which, if focused upon, dis­tract from the mission.

As ven­ture investors, we want com­pa­nies to use our invest­ment to move fast, increas­ing their chances of suc­cess.  We pre­fer to invest addi­tional funds in the impor­tant shifts, turns and piv­ots that are iden­ti­fied through valu­able feed­back along the jour­ney rather than to pay for a final coat of paint on a car that is still in the garage.

Your bm|t Team

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Welcome to the Family

Altavo, a Dres­den and Jena based startup in AI-based voice reha­bil­i­ta­tion, suc­cess­fully closed its € 5.0m Series A financ­ing round on Feb­ru­ary 1, 2024.  bm‑t joined a strong Euro­pean con­sor­tium led by OCCIDENT and includ­ing Novalis Biotech, TGFS, and HTGF to invest in the devel­op­ment of Altavo’s novel Arti­fi­cial Voice.  Altavo’s Arti­fi­cial Voice is a med­ical device designed to help voice­less peo­ple, for exam­ple after laryn­gec­tomy or dur­ing mechan­i­cal ven­ti­la­tion, regain their own, nat­ural sound­ing voice.  The pro­pri­etary “silent speech” tech­nol­ogy, which has been devel­oped in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­sity Dres­den, is based on non-inva­sive radar sens­ing and the lat­est neural net architectures.

For fur­ther details on this excit­ing invest­ment please read this press release: https://www.bm‑t.de/en/2024-en/altavo-concludes-series-a-for-the-development-of-its-artificial-voice/

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Follow-on Investments

Jena based siOP­TICA received a seven-fig­ure invest­ment from Radi­ant Opto-Elec­tron­ics (ROE) – the world´s largest back­light unit assem­bly com­pany with key strate­gic capa­bil­i­ties of opti­cal & struc­ture design. This invest­ment accom­pa­nies and under­scores a strate­gic alliance between the two com­pa­nies, which is geared towards intro­duc­ing world-lead­ing opti­cal solu­tions, par­tic­u­larly based on siOPTICA’s switch­able pri­vacy tech­nolo­gies with many appli­ca­tions in auto­mo­tive pas­sen­ger dis­plays and con­sumer devices.

For fur­ther details about this high-poten­tial invest­ment please read this press release: https://www.bm‑t.de/en/2024-en/radiant-opto-electronics-corp-invests-seven-figure-amount-usd-into-sioptica/

 

Jena based Coach­whis­perer GmbH offers the world’s first live com­mu­ni­ca­tion and mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem for coaches and ath­letes, con­sist­ing of an inno­v­a­tive com­bi­na­tion of hard­ware and soft­ware that allows coaches to seam­lessly com­mu­ni­cate with any selec­tion of play­ers dur­ing live train­ing. Due to the company´s upcom­ing highly-inno­v­a­tive wear­able sen­sors, in many ways Coach­whis­perer is a com­bi­na­tion of a med-tech com­pany and a sports-tech com­pany. Coachwhisperer´s “Hear­able” will track play­ers´ vital data while simul­ta­ne­ously per­form­ing the live-com­mu­ni­ca­tion func­tion.  After refin­ing the prod­uct in mul­ti­ple sports, Coach­whis­perer will ini­tially place its pri­mary focus on enter­ing the large Euro­pean Foot­ball mar­ket, where the founders pos­sess an excel­lent net­work. This near seven-fig­ure round, which was led by bm|t and joined by busi­ness angels, includ­ing a per­fectly-suited sports-tech investor, is focused on achiev­ing quick and broad mar­ket entry.

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Investor Days Thüringen – Registration Now Open!

On June 5^th and 6^th, Investor Days Thürin­gen (IDT), the pre­mier early- and growth-stage pitch event in cen­tral Ger­many, will fea­ture approx­i­mately 50 start-ups pre­sent­ing their inno­va­tions and visions.  After last year´s fan­tas­tic event, we are again excited to offer our guests great live pitches, beers & brats and much more!

Click this link to see a short video of the 2023 event recap. High­lights include the event intro­duc­tion from Thüringen’s Min­is­ter for Econ­omy, Sci­ence and Dig­i­tal Soci­ety, Mr. Wolf­gang Tiefensee and brief inter­views from attendees.

Reg­is­tra­tion is now open!  Mark your cal­en­dars – we look for­ward to see­ing you in June in Erfurt!