Week 17: BUA’s Spring Festival, Celebrating our Startup Successes

Last week, 400 guests from Berlin’s scientific and industrial sectors gathered to celebrate the Berlin University Alliance’s spring festival. The event took place at the Academy of Arts at Pariser Platz, overlooking the Brandenburger Tor.

During the event, BUA spokesperson and President of Freie Universität Berlin, Prof. Dr. Günter Ziegler, cited key praise from the Excellence Strategy’s expert panel evaluation. The panel views the BUA as a compelling model for an integrated research environment—one that is unique in scale within the German university landscape. According to the assessment, the alliance collaborates closely internally and possesses enormous transformative potential, which must now be fully realized.

A jury of investors and industry experts from Hello Tomorrow has selected the HU-startup Shit2Power as one of 100 “Deep Tech Startups to Watch” in 2026, chosen from a pool of 4,800 applicants due to its immense potential.

This recognition grants Shit2Power the opportunity to pitch at the Hello Tomorrow Summit in Amsterdam. There, they will deliver a live pitch to a high-profile audience of over 3,500 deep-tech investors, entrepreneurs, and more than 60 government delegations, competing for a grand prize of €100,000.

Making business processes more efficient, tracking the impact of innovations in real time, and intervening immediately when problems arise? It sounds promising, and thanks to Noreja’s platform—based on Artificial Intelligence and Process Mining—it is actually possible.

The innovative spirit of the founders, including Prof. Dr. Jan Mendling, HU Professor of Computer Science, has now been rewarded: the company closed its latest financing round with a staggering €1.1 million. Noreja intends to use this newly acquired capital to expand its software and establish itself as one of the leading platforms in the field of Generative Process Intelligence.

For more information, check out the latest article in our Newscorner.