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.
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.
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.
Background: From Research to Product
The founding team—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.
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.
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.