Europe’s research institutions generate a substantial share of the world’s most advanced science, but commercial returns on that science remain disproportionately low. The bottleneck is not talent. The Global Deep Tech Report 2026, drawing on a validated dataset of 5,000 startups and 11,500 founders, finds that Europe produces more postgraduate deep-tech founders than any other region, yet trails North America in turning that talent into companies – a gap the report attributes to commercialization and risk-taking culture, not raw ability. Most founding teams in Europe put a researcher and a businessperson in a room together and assume the pairing will work. Often it doesn’t, because neither one can speak the other’s language, and nothing in the arrangement is built to close that distance.
The conventional response to this problem has been to train researchers to become entrepreneurs. Researchers who have spent years developing a technology from first principles are not necessarily looking to reinvent themselves as operators – and asking them to do so adds a layer of founder-fit risk that has nothing to do with the technology itself. The alternative – finding the right commercial co-founder and building a team that does not require either person to be something they are not – is structurally harder to execute, but more honest about what deep-tech commercialization requires.
DEEP πoneers, a program within DEEP – Institute for Deep Tech Innovation at ESMT Berlin, is built on that alternative. Funded by the Joachim Herz Stiftung, it operates across the DACH region and runs twice annually. Its aim is direct: scout deep-tech technologies that are 12 to 18 months from spin-off or at pre-seed stage, match the researchers behind them with experienced commercial entrepreneurs and operators, and then invest in building high-performing founding teams over six months.
The program works in three stages: identifying the right technologies, matching them with the right commercial founders at the right point in the commercialization timeline, and then developing the founding team through structured coaching. Each stage is meant to de-risk the one that follows, and ultimately to de-risk the venture itself.
What the program does
πoneers scouts deep-tech technologies from Max Planck, Fraunhofer, and other leading research institutions across the DACH region. The bar is high on both sides of the match. The technologies are substantive, and the commercial co-founders are experienced entrepreneurs and operators, not recent graduates or career changers, matched to the researcher's level of seniority so the two can work at eye level from the start.
Matching happens at an intensive two-day retreat. What πoneers looks for on the commercial side is what Ali Alam, who manages venture building for the program, calls a missionary founder: impact-driven rather than exit-driven. A researcher who has spent years on a technology because it matters is poorly served by a co-founder chasing a quick return. The alignment has to run deeper than complementary skill sets.
Then comes the part that sets πoneers apart. The program combines a carefully curated scouting and selection process, bringing together high-potential technologies and experienced entrepreneurs, with long-term team development. After a team forms, the program provides up to six months of high-performance team coaching—a commitment most co-founder matching programs don’t make, because most stop at the introduction. The coaching is not about business plans or investment strategies. It is about the relationship: how co-founders communicate, how they make decisions, how they handle disagreement. As Tina Manker, who leads the coaching, puts it, every exchange between co-founders either builds trust or wears it down. The habits that carry a team through a crisis are built long before the crisis arrives.
This is not a peripheral concern. Deep-tech companies often spend a decade or more moving from laboratory proof to commercial reality. The ecosystem has built sophisticated tools for judging where a technology sits on a readiness scale and paid far less attention to whether the team behind it is ready to carry it through that decade. πoneers treats team readiness as a variable worth investing in, not a quality to be assumed.
The team that became Hyca Heat
Dr. Simon Hahn is a chemical engineer who developed his core technology during doctoral research at the Institute for a Sustainable Hydrogen Economy (IHE) and Helmholtz-Institute for Renewable Energy (HIERN) at Forschungszentrum Jülich, one of Germany's largest research centers. The technology addresses a problem that runs through most of industrial manufacturing: process heat. Paper, food, textiles, chemicals, metalworking – production across these sectors depends on heat. The infrastructure that delivers it is largely locked into a single energy source, whether gas or electricity, with no ability to switch based on what is cheapest or cleanest at any given moment.
Hahn’s system, which became Hyca Heat, changes that. It combines specially coated heating elements capable of operating in two modes – electrical resistance heating or flameless catalytic combustion – with proprietary control software that selects the cheapest or lowest-emission energy source available at any point: electricity, natural gas, or green hydrogen. No hardware modifications are needed to switch between them. The system is modular, rack-based, and designed to integrate into existing industrial heat loops. The company projects cost reductions of up to 40 percent against conventional systems, a payback period of around three years, and – running on green hydrogen – the potential to eliminate emissions entirely from the processes it serves. Hyca Heat holds an exclusive license to four patents on the technology.
Dr. Richard Büssow is a repeat deep-tech founder with an engineering background in acoustics and turbomachinery. He holds a doctorate in signal analysis from TU Berlin and spent roughly a decade at MAN Energy Solutions, first as a noise and vibration specialist and then as an R&D project manager running university-cooperation and public-funding projects in condition-based maintenance and machine learning. In 2017 he co-founded Industrial Analytics, a B2B software company applying AI to industrial asset monitoring, where he led the technology. He built a team of more than twenty, over half of them with doctorates, raised pre-seed and institutional seed funding, and exited to a corporate acquirer in 2023.
He applied to πoneers independently, with no prior connection to Simon or to the technology. Having built and sold one deep-tech company, he was looking to build again, at greater scale. He is now co-founder and CTO of Hyca Heat, where he leads the control software.
Henning Hatje is the team’s third co-founder and its chief commercial officer. His career runs through the energy sector, strategy consulting, and startup building. He began inside the energy industry itself, on infrastructure projects at E.ON, European energy policy work at BDEW in Brussels, and energy advisory at PwC, before four years as a strategy consultant at Boston Consulting Group. He then co-founded Lhotse in 2020, a Berlin-based software company for indirect procurement. In that position, he raised more than €5 million in pre-seed and seed funding and served as managing director through 2024. He also advises and invests in early-stage B2B ventures on go-to-market: sales, marketing, and customer success. For Hyca Heat, that gives the team a co-founder who has built and sold complex B2B products and who understands how energy markets operate, both of which the technology depends on.
None of the three had met before they set out to build the company together.
What happened in the program
The first cohort matching workshop was held in Potsdam. Simon and Richard met there, went through several rounds of structured conversations with other participants, and ended the two days as part of a three-way match with a second commercial co-founder. Within two to three weeks, that third person decided not to continue.
Coaching then began with Simon and Richard as a pair. The first work had nothing to do with the technology or the business. They were based at opposite ends of Germany. Before anything else, they needed to figure out how to actually work together: what communication channels to use, how often to be in contact, what warranted a phone call rather than a message, and when it was worth traveling to be in the same room – and what to do with that time when they were. These questions sound basic because they are basic. The coaching is explicit about slowing teams down enough to answer them properly, rather than assuming the answers will emerge on their own under pressure.
A few months into coaching, Simon and Richard decided they wanted a third co-founder. Simon had registered with other co-founder matching platforms in parallel with πoneers, and through one of them received an email introduction to Henning Hatje, who would become the team’s chief commercial officer. The πoneers team brought Henning into the coaching process. In practice, this meant restarting some of the foundational work: roles, decision-making authority, and communication norms were renegotiated for a trio rather than a pair. Adding a person to an early-stage founding team is not additive – it changes the structure of every working relationship in the group, and the coaching treated it as such.
Approximately three to four months into the coaching period, Simon, Richard, and Henning founded the company. Hyca Heat was registered in Berlin. The remaining two months of coaching focused on establishing routines, the recurring habits that make a team functional when the stakes are high and the workload is heavy. The company existed now; the question was whether the habits they had built before founding it would hold once the pressures of an actual startup took over.
By the end of six months, the team had completed the program. Tina Manker's and Ali Alam’s assessment of the outcome is measured: three people who did not know each other entered a structured process, formed a company, and came out the other side still working together, with established structures and a functioning relationship. Whether the company succeeds over the decade or more it will take to reach full commercial maturity is a different question, and an honest one. What the program can say is that the team is in a position to find out.
Where they are now
Since completing the program, Hyca Heat has moved quickly for a company at its stage. In early 2026 the team won the Startupland Award in the Green Tech / Climate Tech category, pitching at the event in Cologne, where Simon and Henning presented the hybrid approach together. In April the company appeared at Hannover Messe, the world's largest industrial trade fair, as part of the Forschungszentrum Jülich booth, putting the technology in front of exactly the industrial buyers it will need to reach.
The first concrete deployment is taking shape in the paper industry. Hyca Heat is planning a demonstration plant for paper drying at a regional paper mill, the application where its ability to switch between energy sources maps most directly onto a customer's cost and emissions pressures. The company is openly recruiting pilot customers and industrial partners to expand from there.
The relationship with Forschungszentrum Jülich, where the technology originated, has also been formalized: a licensing agreement covering the underlying research is now in place, clearing the path for commercial development.
What none of this settles is the longer question. A demonstration plant is a first proof, and the work of reaching paper mills, food processors, and chemical plants at scale will take the better part of a decade. The team that the program built is the thing carrying it there.
What this demonstrates
The Hyca Heat story is not yet a success story in the fullest sense. A founded company with a functioning team and a credible technology is a meaningful starting point, not an arrival. Deep-tech timelines do not allow for that claim to be made honestly at the six-month mark, and πoneers does not make it.
What the program can point to is something more specific: a structural problem with a documented solution. Only 36 percent of European deep-tech founders have prior founding experience, against 43 percent in North America, and the Global Deep Tech Report 2026 concludes that a researcher without that experience is better off recruiting a co-founder who has it than trying to build a company on technical strength alone. That is what πoneers is built to do. Simon had the science. What he needed was a team around him with the commercial and entrepreneurial experience to carry it, and the program set out to build exactly that. Whether the match holds is not something a matching event can settle on its own, which is why the six months that follow matter as much as the two days that start them.
Simon and Richard met through the program and began the work of becoming co-founders; Henning joined later, and the team re-formed around three. What matters is not the route each of them took in, but that the company they built has a foundation under it – established roles, working habits, a relationship that has already been tested by the ordinary friction of building something together. That foundation is ultimately what DEEP πoneers is designed to build: teams with the resilience and alignment to carry deep-tech ventures through the long journey from research to commercial impact.
About DEEP πoneers
DEEP πoneers is a deep-tech co-founder matching and high-performance team coaching program operating across the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). It is part of ESMT Berlin’s Institute for Deep Tech Innovation (DEEP). DEEP identifies the best people, technologies, and business opportunities, and brings them together in ways that translate these connections into globally competitive ventures and tangible economic impact that advance Europe’s deep-tech leadership and competitiveness. πoneers runs twice a year and provides up to six months of coaching to founding teams formed through its matching workshops. The Joachim Herz Stiftung funded the pilot year and has committed to the two years following.