• intral­o­gis­tics group KION Group takes a stake of nearly 20 per cent and an invest­ment of around 5 mil­lion euros in ifesca GmbH
• lead investor bm‑t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment thürin­gen invests once again around 2.2 mil­lion euros in the Ilme­nau-based company
• ifesca devel­ops soft­ware solu­tions for opti­mal energy management

ifesca, a soft­ware com­pany based in Ilme­nau has won  one of the world’s lead­ing sup­pli­ers of fork­lift trucks and ware­house logis­tics, the Linde Mate­r­ial Han­dling GmbH, a sub­sidiary of KION GROUP AG, as an impor­tant strate­gic investor. With an invest­ment of around 5 mil­lion euros and a stake of almost 20 per cent, the intral­o­gis­tics group has become the sec­ond-largest owner of the young com­pany. At the same time, the KION Group and ifesca agreed on a strate­gic coop­er­a­tion. The largest investor, bm‑t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment thürin­gen, is also par­tic­i­pat­ing with around 2.2 mil­lion euros. “We are delighted to have suc­cess­fully com­pleted the cur­rent round of financ­ing and to win the KION Group as an indus­trial and glob­ally active part­ner for the future,” reports Sebas­t­ian Rit­ter, CEO and co-founder of ifesca GmbH, and is pos­i­tive about the company’s future development.

“Since our seed invest­ment, we have seen how the team and tech­nol­ogy have sig­nif­i­cantly devel­oped. We are con­vinced that ifesca will play an impor­tant role in the excit­ing mar­kets of AI-based deci­sion-mak­ing processes. The inno­v­a­tive part­ner­ship with KION Group for opti­mised energy man­age­ment in intral­o­gis­tics is a per­fect exam­ple of the huge poten­tial,” com­ments Cor­nelia Böse, Senior Invest­ment Man­ager at bm‑t.

The KION Group will use ifesca’s soft­ware plat­form in the intral­o­gis­tics sec­tor. “With ifesca’s AI-based soft­ware, we will offer our cus­tomers a holis­tic solu­tion for their energy man­age­ment in the future,” explains Ste­fan Prokosch, Senior Vice Pres­i­dent Brand Man­age­ment at Linde Mate­r­ial Han­dling GmbH. “With the accu­rate fore­cast­ing results of this plat­form, our cus­tomers will be able to plan opti­mal load­ing times for their indus­trial truck fleets, avoid load­ing peaks and thus sig­nif­i­cantly reduce their energy costs.” In addi­tion, the plat­form can be eas­ily and flex­i­bly inte­grated into exist­ing energy man­age­ment sys­tems through open inter­faces. “A real added value for our cus­tomers and thus also for us,” Ste­fan Prokosch is con­vinced about the ifesca plat­form. Super­mar­ket chains, auto­mo­tive pro­duc­tion, DIY stores and many other users will thus be able to gain easy access to mod­ern tech­nol­ogy for the energy-sus­tain­able appli­ca­tion of their KION logis­tics solu­tions in the future.

How­ever, the intral­o­gis­tics sec­tor is just one of many other pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions in which the
35-mem­ber company’s energy man­age­ment sys­tem can be used with great added value for sav­ing and opti­mis­ing the use of energy and thus increas­ing sus­tain­abil­ity. “Our goal is to opti­mally sup­port deci­sion-mak­ing processes by offer­ing inno­v­a­tive soft­ware solu­tions in the field of fore­cast­ing, opti­mi­sa­tion and asso­ci­ated ser­vices,” explains Sebas­t­ian Rit­ter. “The focus is on max­i­mum ease of use and intu­itive han­dling of busi­ness processes.”

The new cap­i­tal is to be used for the company’s growth, the expan­sion of sales activ­i­ties in other Euro­pean and inter­na­tional coun­tries and for the devel­op­ment of newly acquired markets.

About ifesca GmbH

ifesca GmbH is an IoT com­pany based in Ilme­nau, Thuringia, and offers soft­ware prod­ucts for indus­try and the energy sec­tor. With the cloud-based plat­form ifesca.AIVA® and the stand-alone com­po­nent ifesca.ADAM®, the com­pany has devel­oped two appli­ca­tions with which all mar­ket roles in the energy indus­try as well as energy-inten­sive indus­trial com­pa­nies can use the dig­i­tal ser­vice in the area of fore­cast­ing and opti­mi­sa­tion of energy data. By pro­vid­ing fully auto­mated real-time fore­casts, the AI-based intel­li­gent fore­cast­ing sys­tem sup­ports deci­sions for energy sup­ply and demand. This makes it pos­si­ble to reli­ably serve plan­ning processes that are becom­ing increas­ingly com­plex due to the grow­ing amount of data.

The speed with which rec­om­men­da­tions for action can be made is also sig­nif­i­cantly increased. ifesca cus­tomers are thus enabled to meet the require­ments of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and a holis­tic view of energy issues in the com­pany. They can use the poten­tial gained in this way to increase their competitiveness.

www.ifesca.de

About KION Group

The KION Group is one of the world’s lead­ing sup­pli­ers of indus­trial trucks and sup­ply chain solu­tions. Its range of prod­ucts and ser­vices includes indus­trial trucks such as fork­lift trucks and ware­house trucks as well as inte­grated automa­tion tech­nolo­gies and soft­ware solu­tions for opti­mis­ing sup­ply chains — includ­ing all asso­ci­ated ser­vices. In more than 100 coun­tries, the KION Group’s solu­tions improve the flow of mate­ri­als and infor­ma­tion in pro­duc­tion plants, ware­houses and dis­tri­b­u­tion centres.

The MDax-listed Group is the largest man­u­fac­turer of indus­trial trucks in Europe in terms of units sold in 2020. In China, the KION Group is the lead­ing for­eign pro­ducer in terms of rev­enue in 2020 and the third-largest sup­plier when domes­tic man­u­fac­tur­ers are included. In addi­tion, the KION Group is one of the world’s lead­ing sup­pli­ers of ware­house automa­tion in terms of rev­enue in 2019.

At the end of 2020, more than 1.6 mil­lion indus­trial trucks and over 6,000 installed sys­tems from the KION Group were in use world­wide by cus­tomers of var­i­ous sizes in numer­ous indus­tries on six con­ti­nents. The Group cur­rently employs more than 36,000 peo­ple and gen­er­ated rev­enue of €8.3 bil­lion in the 2020 finan­cial year.

www.kiongroup.com

About bm|t

bm|t is one of the first addresses for invest­ments in Thuringia, Ger­many. bm|t invests in start-up teams and com­pa­nies in the Free State with a clear aim of gen­er­at­ing pos­i­tive invest­ment returns. This is how inno­va­tion and eco­nomic growth in Thuringia are financed. bm|t cur­rently man­ages ten funds with a total vol­ume of over 440 mil­lion euros and invests in inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies in nearly all sec­tors and in all phases of com­pany devel­op­ment — from the start-up and growth phases to buy­outs and other suc­ces­sion situations.

www.bm‑t.com