€740,000 for the Step from Prototype to Product
The Athegus founding team has received EXIST Research Transfer funding from Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The €740,000 grant supports transforming research results into a market-ready product over 18 months.
This kind of funding is neither a prize nor seed capital in the usual sense. It is a clearly defined assignment: to demonstrate that a solid research result can become a product that healthcare facilities can deploy reliably. That very threshold, the move from a working prototype to a dependable system, is in our experience the hardest part of the entire development. We therefore see the grant less as an accolade and more as an obligation to make that transition cleanly and without shortcuts.
What This Enables
The funding accelerates hospOS development in two phases:
Phase 1 (Months 1-12): Advancing the platform from research prototype to production-ready system. Focus areas include security hardening, building integration protocols, and multi-vendor robot coordination.
Phase 2 (Months 13-18): Preparing for commercial launch and external financing. This includes pilot deployments, regulatory compliance verification, and establishing partnerships with healthcare facilities.
The difference between the two phases is not only one of timing but of kind. Phase 1 is about technical substance: a system that runs in a real-world laboratory under attentive supervision has to be hardened so that it works in the routine operation of a clinic without constant oversight. That covers how the system handles the failure of an individual robot just as much as the question of what happens when an elevator, a door, or a building management system does not respond as expected. In Phase 2, the focus shifts from the machine to the organization: pilot partners, regulatory evidence, and durable partnerships determine whether the technology holds up beyond the development lab.
Why EXIST Research Transfer
EXIST Research Transfer specifically targets research-based startups with high innovation potential and technical risk. Athegus is the first team from Deggendorf Institute of Technology to receive this particular funding variant.
The program recognizes that healthcare robot management solves real operational challenges with technical approaches that haven't been commercialized before: vendor-agnostic coordination, privacy-by-design architecture, on-premise operation.
These three points are not slogans but deliberate decisions with consequences. Vendor-agnostic coordination means a facility is not locked into a single robot manufacturer's ecosystem but can operate devices from different suppliers through a shared control layer. Privacy by design means that the protection of sensitive data is not bolted on afterward but built into the architecture from the start. And on-premise operation means the data stays where it originates, namely within the facility itself, rather than necessarily flowing into someone else's cloud. In healthcare in particular, this combination is far from a given, and it was precisely the reason the task could not be solved with existing off-the-shelf solutions.
Sovereignty as a Design Principle
We treat digital sovereignty not as a political label but as a technical property that you either build in or you don't. A robot management system sits in a sensitive position: it knows the routes, schedules, and workflows of a facility and controls physical devices in an environment where patients are moving about. Anyone operating such a system should be able to understand which data is processed, where it is held, and who has access.
For that reason, hospOS is designed to remain operational without a permanent connection to external services. This is more demanding to engineer, but it matches what operators of critical infrastructure actually need in practice. We stay honest on one point here: software makes no one automatically KRITIS- or NIS-2-compliant. Compliance is a property of the entire organization, not of a single product. What good software can do is create the right preconditions and make the proof easier rather than harder. More on how we understand independence and control can be found under Sovereignty.
From Research to Product
The founding team, made up of Sebastian Schmidt, Tobias Greiler, Stefan Fischer, and Eva Pletl, developed the initial technology during the SMART FOREST 5G Clinics research project. Three years of work in clinical real-world laboratories revealed the core problem: excellent robots, fragmented control systems.
hospOS emerged from solving this practical challenge. The EXIST funding now enables transforming those research results into a reliable product healthcare facilities can actually deploy.
The path from research to product is often underestimated. A prototype is allowed to fail; a product is not. In a real-world laboratory it is acceptable for someone on the team to step in when a handover between robots gets stuck. In the routine operation of a facility, that is simply not an option. This shift in requirements, from "it works under observation" to "it works when no one is watching," is the real work of the months ahead. It is less spectacular than the first working demonstrator, but it determines whether a good idea becomes a dependable tool.
What's Next
Development continues with pilot partners in healthcare. The focus remains on addressing real operational challenges: seamless building integration, intuitive operation for non-technical staff, and reliable coordination across different robot types.
The matter of usability in particular carries weight. A system that only specialists can operate is of little help in the day-to-day work of a facility. The people who work with hospOS are nursing staff, logistics and service personnel, not robotics engineers. The controls therefore have to stay comprehensible, including when something unexpected happens. We measure success not by the number of features but by how quietly operations run when the system simply does its job.
Athegus GmbH was founded concurrently with the funding start.
About EXIST Research Transfer: A program of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, supporting teams in transforming outstanding research results from universities into marketable products and services. Learn more at exist.de.