10 million euros in funding for UNITE – Startup Factory Berlin-Brandenburg
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UNITE – Startup Factory Berlin-Brandenburg has been recognised by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy as one of ten nationwide flagship projects for science-based start-ups. UNITE is to be established as a central transfer platform for technology-driven spin-offs from science and industry in the capital region. The Helmholtz Centre Berlin will also benefit from this.
The award for the flagship project comes with funding of up to 10 million euros over five years. Private investors had already pledged an additional 10 million euros in advance, with another 10 million euros coming from the VC Pre-Seed Fund. This gives the project a strong financial foundation (a total of 30 million euros) for UNITE and future deep tech start-ups in the capital region.
The Berlin University Alliance – consisting of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin – has been instrumental in establishing UNITE e.V. and will now work alongside a broad-based consortium to strategically and sustainably expand knowledge transfer in Berlin-Brandenburg. Important impetus for the conception and design of UNITE came from "Science & Start-ups" – the joint start-up centre of the BUA universities.
The HZB will be more closely integrated into Berlin's start-up landscape
For the Berlin-Brandenburg region, the participation of the Berlin Excellence Network is an important step that will significantly strengthen and structure the knowledge and innovation space. The Helmholtz Centre Berlin also benefits as a partner in the UNITE project. This gives employees easier access to support services for innovation and transfer from the Berlin University Alliance and other UNITE partners.
"One particular advantage is that the Helmholtz Centre Berlin will be even more firmly and sustainably anchored in Berlin's start-up landscape. Where creative minds come together, new ideas and networks for their realisation emerge," says Dr. Paul Harten, Head of Technology Transfer at HZB. He emphasises that the joint collaboration in UNITE will enable more innovation in and from research.
Focus on AI, health and green technologies
The aim is to structurally strengthen innovation pathways between research and application beyond traditional technology transfer and to bring forth a new generation of technology-driven start-ups from science. The focus will be on artificial intelligence, health and green technologies.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Blind spot for the arrangement of atomsArtificial intelligence is increasingly being used to predict the properties of new materials. A research team from Jena and the United States now shows in a study published in the journal Nature Computational Science that when language models are used for this purpose, they reliably identify which types of atoms a material contains. However, they make insufficient use of information about how those atoms are arranged in space. Neither larger models nor additional training data resolve this weakness. For material properties that depend strongly on structure, AI models specifically designed to process spatial relationships are therefore the more reliable choice. (DOI: 10.1038/s43588-026-01045-2)
- Patterns of polar vortices in lead-free superlattices on siliconA team at HZB has, for the first time, reported polar vortices in (BaTiO3/SrTiO3)10 superlattices on silicon. These results expand the range of materials and substrates on which polar topological textures can occur and open up new options for incorporating complex ferroelectric states into silicon-based technologies.