From Research to Startup: Prehensio’s Robotics Journey

Note: The following contributions are personal impulses from Max Eckel. They represent individual reflections and are intended to stimulate discussion and further thought.

A while ago, Fraunhofer IPA reached out to us with a concrete situation. They had a team working on robotic manipulation. Specifically: software that helps robots reliably grasp and handle objects in the real world, even when those objects are unknown, messy, or changing. If you’ve ever seen an industrial robot fail outside of a perfectly controlled environment, you know why this is hard. And why it matters.

The technology was strong. But it was still a research project. And Fraunhofer was very clear about what was missing: a business co-founder who could help turn this into a company. What made this work was not just that they asked. The team at Fraunhofer IPA had already done something that is surprisingly rare: they had made the technology understandable and exciting to people outside their lab. No hype. No overpromising. Just a clear explanation of what problem this solves and where it could realistically be used. That’s why our business community leaned in.

Our side of this was intentionally very unspectacular. We don’t run big deep tech demo days. We don’t create shiny new programs for every case. There are already great support structures out there. Our biggest lever is much simpler. We educate world-class entrepreneurs. So when a lab reaches out, all we really have to do is make the opportunity visible. An email from a research group. An internal “job posting”. A few WhatsApp messages. That’s it.

Several WHU alums reached out. One of them was Franz Dornbach. Franz joined early, when this was still half research project, half company. Together with the technical founding team, he helped shape what is now Prehensio GmbH: a robotics and AI venture bringing advanced grasping and manipulation software out of the lab and into real industrial use cases.

They applied for exist - from science to business Forschungstransfer. They got it. And Prehensio has now officially left stealth. What I like about this story is how little theater it contains. Just a research institute that did the work to make its technology accessible. And a founder willing to commit before anything looked finished.

Congrats to Franz and the entire Prehensio team. And real kudos to Fraunhofer IPA for building a bridge that people actually want to cross.

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