Trip-Panda is an online platform that uses artificial intelligence to make sustainable travel accessible to a broad target group. Founder Jonas Herdlitschke, a graduate of Jade University, has been awarded a ten-month start-up grant from NBank totalling 22,000 euros. The grant will help him and his partner Jonah Schröder, an economics student at the University of Oldenburg, to successfully realise their business idea.
Trip-Panda aims to help travellers find the best possible destinations with the help of an easy-to-use search function. In addition to individual preferences, the platform analyses various sustainability criteria and evaluates the possible trips using a sustainability ranking on a scale of 1 to 5. Accommodation with long travel distances receive a sustainability bonus, which goes directly towards CO2 compensation measures.
The second grant also goes to a start-up whose business model has a strong sustainability focus. A lot of energy is usually lost when cooking with conventional cooking pots, as heat does not remain effectively inside the pot and escapes through the outer wall and the lid. Felix Grotjan and Marie-Theres Heimke from "ExpoTherm" want to solve this problem and have developed a thermal cover for cooking pots that reduces heat loss when cooking with such pots by an average of 50 per cent. For their patent-pending development, they are receiving a one-year "EXIST start-up grant" from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the European Social Fund totalling around 95,000 euros to turn their development into a successful business model. Grotjan and Heimke both studied at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Netherlands). The funding is the result of co-operation and mutual support between the universities of Oldenburg and Groningen in the field of start-ups and transfer.
The ExpoTherm team is supported by us as GIZ and by Prof Dr Achim Kittel, Professor of Microscopy of Nanoscale Energy Transfer at the Institute of Physics. The prototype for the thermal envelope was developed and built in our innovation workshop.