Shortly after the orig­i­nal found­ing of IFESCA GmbH, the founders suc­ceeded in secur­ing start-up financ­ing for their com­pany. The Ilme­nau-based start-up focuses on the devel­op­ment and mar­ket­ing of a cloud-based soft­ware solu­tion using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. This is intended to solve highly com­plex fore­cast­ing and opti­mi­sa­tion tasks in the short­est pos­si­ble time and in a com­fort­able way. This inno­v­a­tive con­cept con­vinced the Thüringer Auf­baubank sub­sidiary bm|t (bm‑t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment thürin­gen gmbh), which con­se­quently invested in IFESCA GmbH via the TSF (Thuringian Start-up Fund) with a six-fig­ure sum. This ensured the financ­ing of the estab­lish­ment of the com­pany as well as the devel­op­ment of this inno­v­a­tive soft­ware solution.
Regard­less of the indus­try, com­pa­nies have to make a large num­ber of deci­sions every day. Deci­sion sup­port sys­tems are used for this pur­pose, but they are reach­ing their lim­its due to increas­ing dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion (key­word: “Indus­try 4.0” or “Big Data”) and the result­ing flood of data. IFESCA GmbH plans to take this into account on the basis of a com­pletely new soft­ware archi­tec­ture approach. This approach will make it pos­si­ble to sig­nif­i­cantly increase both the fore­cast qual­ity and opti­mi­sa­tion qual­ity as well as the degree of automa­tion and the per­for­mance of the entire sys­tem com­pared to the use of con­ven­tional solu­tions. For the cus­tomer, this will result in enor­mous increases in effi­ciency and cost sav­ings. The first tar­get mar­ket is the Ger­man and, in the medium term, the inter­na­tional energy mar­ket. The back­ground is the founders’ many years of expe­ri­ence in this area due to their pre­vi­ous work at Fraun­hofer IOSB-AST. In the energy indus­try envi­ron­ment, com­pa­nies are char­ac­terised by the fact that they reg­u­larly have to cre­ate fore­casts of energy quan­ti­ties or out­puts, which in turn form the basis for cal­cu­lat­ing opti­mal deci­sions regard­ing energy trad­ing, energy sup­ply, energy con­ver­sion and energy trans­port. The young team of spe­cial­ists led by Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Sebas­t­ian Rit­ter is con­vinced that such a high-per­for­mance and user-friendly fore­cast­ing and opti­mi­sa­tion sys­tem will also arouse inter­est in many other sec­tors, such as the insur­ance sec­tor or for­ward­ing companies.
About the TSF: The TSF has a vol­ume of € 18.75 mil­lion and can invest up to € 1.2 mil­lion in young, inno­v­a­tive start-up com­pa­nies from Thuringia in the form of minor­ity hold­ings. The start-up may not have been founded more than 5 years ago.
About bm|t: bm|t, based in Erfurt, is a sub­sidiary of the Thüringer Auf­baubank and one of the top addresses for invest­ments in Thuringia. bm|t cur­rently man­ages eight funds with a total vol­ume of around 320 mil­lion euros, which invest in inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies in almost all sec­tors and in all phases of cor­po­rate devel­op­ment, both in the start-up and growth phases or in cor­po­rate suc­ces­sion situations.
About IFESCA GmbH: IFESCA GmbH was founded in Decem­ber 2016 and com­prises a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary team of experts cur­rently con­sist­ing of 7 employ­ees who have already worked together suc­cess­fully for many years. The young com­pany thus com­bines inno­v­a­tive ideas and visions with many years of expe­ri­ence in the entire spec­trum of soft­ware devel­op­ment for the Ger­man and inter­na­tional energy mar­ket, sales, mar­ket­ing and sup­port, and sci­en­tific expert knowl­edge in the areas of fore­cast­ing and optimisation.