They did it again: Dr. Anne Vortkamp and Dr. Philipp Lemke won two shared First Prizes and an Audience Award in pitch contests

Again, Anne and Philipp, the will-be founders of our start-up AgriBluBio, won a shared First Prize in the pitch contest of the REACH - EUREGIO Start-up Center of our University last week. Thus, tickets for next year’s participation at Enschede Slush’D are already secured. And yesterday, they also won a shared First Prize in the much tougher competition during the Sciene-to-Startup Convention in Münster, where they also won the Audience Award! Clearly, AgriBluBio is on a very good way towards success. This year, Anne organized a broad variety of field trials for CaraPlant, mostly in vineyards across Germany, but also in other arable crops such as apples, and in other countries such as the Netherlands, alone or in collaboration with partners. She and Philipp also visited the trials and found that throughout, the farmers were rather pleased with the performance of our first product. Of course, there was no drought last summer and so, we could not validate the induction of drought stress tolerance by CaraPlant. But even in the absence of stress, the farmers said that their crops tended to grow better when treated. This is because CaraPlant is a carefully balanced blend of second generation chitosans with different bioactivities required for agriculture, including the induction of stress tolerance and the stimulation of plant growth and development. We will continue and extend these trials next year, to include additional crops and countries, with the tail wind of the pitch awards.