VAARHAFT is the first start-up to receive an EXIST start-up grant from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection as part of the joint start-up support provided by Wedel University of Applied Sciences Startup Bridge and Startup Port. The company’s aim is to secure digital images with a certificate of authenticity and thus make fraud more difficult, especially in connection with increasingly convincing deepfakes.
“At a time when generative artificial intelligence is made accessible to everyone and deepfakes are becoming increasingly convincing, we can no longer blindly trust the authenticity of digital images,” explains co-founder and CEO Linus Kameni, who studied aerospace engineering at the TU Braunschweig. “This creates scope for various forms of fraud and targeted manipulation, such as insurance fraud, identity fraud, fake news or fake profiles.”
Securing and certifying digital images as soon as they are created
The three-person VAARHAFT team, consisting of Linus Kameni, Paul Franken and Anne Patzer, has developed an innovative solution to this problem. With the help of an innovative algorithm, digital images are secured and certified during their creation. A special image capture and a multi-stage server-side verification process guarantee the authenticity of the image origin. Only guaranteed “genuine” images receive a certificate of authenticity to make their credibility visible and comprehensible to everyone.
Paul Franken, who is responsible for technical development and is currently completing his degree in business informatics at Wedel University of Applied Sciences, and Anne Patzer, who studied business administration in Wedel and is responsible for the start-up’s business development, complete the founding team.
Startup Port helped with the EXIST application
When applying for the EXIST start-up grant, the startup received intensive support from the Startup Port and the Startup Bridge of the FH Wedel and the TU Brauschweig. During the funding period, Startup Port and Startup Bridge advise the team on organizational tasks as well as budget planning and management. In addition, they work with the team to clarify issues relating to founding, organization and corporate development.
The EXIST start-up grant has been supporting VAARHAFT since June 2023 for a period of exactly one year. The scholarship offers a very good opportunity to further develop the business model under attractive conditions and to prepare the business start-up with extensive support. The support includes a monthly salary as well as a coaching budget of up to 5,000 euros and a material budget of up to 30,000 euros.
Focus is now on the minimum viable product
The founding team gives an outlook on the next steps in the founding process of VAARHAFT: “In the coming months of EXIST funding, our focus will be on the further development of our minimum viable product. We want to test it as quickly as possible in order to optimize it with a focus on usage. We want to receive initial feedback on our solution in discussions with industry experts and our first potential customers. We will also start working on a financing strategy immediately and apply to potential investors in order to secure follow-up financing for the time after the scholarship.”
The University of Applied Sciences Wedel
Wedel University of Applied Sciences is one of the few private, non-profit universities of applied sciences in Germany. The state-recognized university of applied sciences is run by a non-profit limited company that is financed by tuition fees, a state subsidy and third-party funding. Wedel University of Applied Sciences offers its approximately 1,300 students 13 Bachelor’s and nine Master’s degree programs in the fields of computer science, engineering and economics. The campus is located just outside Hamburg in Wedel.
Startup Port cooperates with Startup Bridge
The start-up and innovation platform Startup Bridge is the start-up support of the FH Wedel and cooperates with the Startup Port. Since August 2020, the team has already advised and supported around 60 teams on their way to setting up their own business. Wedel scores with its location in the Hamburg metropolitan region. The Startup Bridge acts as an interface between Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein in the promotion of start-ups.
Startup Port bundles the start-up activities of a total of ten universities and research institutions in the Hamburg metropolitan region under a common brand. Together, they are taking a further step towards effectively networking the players in Hamburg, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein to strengthen the start-up ecosystem in the metropolitan region.
