Staex raises €1.65 million in a pre-seed round -

Staex, a Berlin-based deep tech startup, announced today that it has raised a €1.65 million pre-seed funding round led by the two investors: Brandenburg Kapital, a subsidiary of the Investitionsbank des Landes Brandenburg and Blockwall Capital, who previously backed such startups and distributed protocols, such as Solana, fetch.ai, Hedera Hashgraph and Hypatos.

This round also includes highly experienced business angels. Andreas Möller, CEO of UNIBERG, who has a strong network in the telco-industry and provides powerful support for the product strategy of Staex.

Staex is a software platform that provides a unique bridge between the IoT industry and Web 3.0. By bringing these novel technologies to existing applications, Staex improves such fundamental use cases, such as complex device networking, large scale deployment orchestration, and data security.

Currently available tools do not allow secure and transparent data flows across massively distributed devices and complex environments. Also, they do not truly provide simple and decentralized control. Staex provides a next generation tool for IoT enabling a more lightweight alternative to such orchestrating tools as Kubernetes, OpenShift, Nomad or Balena. In contrast to these solutions Staex provides Web 3.0-features as a full master-less management suite, fully decentralized networking and service mesh with up to 5 times lower software footprint for IoT compared to the mentioned above tools.

“Connecting machines with a plethora of blockchain and DLT protocols will enable a global machine-to-machine economy, where machines will be able to securely execute value transactions. This machine automation will save time and money for existing IoT businesses and give back time to humanity that will enjoy such automated use cases as peer-to-peer energy trading in the future”, said Dr. Alexandra Mikityuk, co-founder and CEO of Staex.

Currently, Staex is used by their customers in building future-proof infrastructures for smart cities and smart utilities. With such infrastructures, IoT applications in cities could have an economic impact of $930 billion to $1.6 trillion per year in 2025. This can be generated through more efficient traffic, energy, and other smart city systems.

The rapid development of the IoT market and its corresponding applications has revealed the inefficiencies of today's infrastructures: heterogenous IT systems are inefficient and cannot efficiently scale for massive IoT and Web 3.0 applications. In such an IT landscape consisting of public and private sectors, multiple vendors, and municipalities, all with a multitude of IoT devices, it’s almost impossible to harmonize the landscape with existing Cloud solutions. By bringing modern Web 3.0 technologies to IoT, Staex solves this problem and rethinks the IoT industry making such services more efficient, secure, and sustainable.

“These fundamental changes for IoT are becoming especially important with regard to European ESG goals, where we will create a huge impact through our investment into Staex. Additionally, we have identified a great potential in orchestration software for distributed and heterogeneous IT infrastructures because collaborative business models and the end of the data silos era is close by. We are convinced that Alexandra and Philip have the potential to develop Staex successfully and position the company as the international market leader”, shared Markus Barnickel, Investment Manager at Brandenburg Kapital.

A new paradigm for easy vendor and 3rd party services integration, inspired by blockchain technologies, will introduce huge efficiencies to the market over the next few years. “Our investment into Staex underlines our dedication to Web 3.0 technologies and clearly shows the impact these technologies can have on industrial applications. It is our strong conviction that the next wave of opportunities within decentralized technologies lies in business models such as Staex‘s”, said Dominic Briggs, General Partner at Blockwall Capital. “By applying such technologies to the IoT market, Staex is aiming to revolutionize how IoT services are built.”

“This investment will help us to move faster towards our vision of changing the IoT-landscape of tomorrow and simplifying integrations. We will enable our customers to focus on building the future instead of spending time on old and complex IT solutions”, said Staex co-founder and COO Philip Toepffer. “Our goal is to be the first choice when it comes to the creation of distributed infrastructure and integration of software for IoT. With this goal in mind we enable companies working closely together to create collaborative business models through shared services.”

About Staex GmbH

Staex, as a leading team in the industrial web 3.0 space, was ex-cubated out of the innovation lab of Deutsche Telekom and is based on a patented cutting-edge technology. Following a management buy-out process, Staex has been independently operating on the market since 2021 and will relocate the company´s headquarter to Brandenburg once the financing has been completed.

In 2021 Staex was honored with the Deep Tech Award 2021 by the Berlin Senate in recognition of remarkable deep tech innovations in the area of IoT and Industry 4.0 and was selected for the Intel Ignite program winter batch 2021.

For further information, visit: www.staex.io

About Brandenburg Kapital GmbH/ ILB

Brandenburg Kapital GmbH is a subsidiary of the Investitionsbank des Landes Brandenburg (ILB). Since 1993, as the venture capital arm of ILB, it has supported Brandenburg-based companies by acquiring equity stakes and equity-like investments. As a public venture capital company, experienced lead investor and active partner, Brandenburg Kapital ensures a strong equity base for start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises in the State of Brandenburg on the basis of a stable group environment. The Early-stage and Growth Fund is currently available in the amount of around 100 million euros for this purpose. The funds for the Brandenburg Kapital fund, which was set up on behalf of the Brandenburg Ministry of Economics, are currently provided by the European Fund for Regional Development and by the ILB. Through ILB's investment activities, 244 companies have so far been supported on their growth course with around 275 million euros. In addition, private investors have invested more than 600 million euros in the companies to date.

For further information, visit: www.brandenburg-kapital.de