In the seed financing round, Fritz Bittmann Holding and Hessen Kapital I are investing in the Darmstadt-based start-up Tec4Med Lifescience, which was founded in 2017. The start-up develops intelligent cooling solutions for the transportation and storage of temperature-sensitive goods. With the Nelumbox, the company offers the world's first active and fully digital refrigeration solution for pharmaceutical products and samples.

The cold chain logistics market has been growing steadily for years. With an annual growth rate of eight to nine percent and a total volume of around 13.4 billion dollars, the pharmaceutical industry is one of the strongest future markets in logistics. The same applies to the e-commerce sector, where the cold chain on the last mile has been a major hurdle to date. To date, temperature-critical goods have only been transported using passive cool boxes (based on cold packs or dry ice) due to a lack of alternatives, which are associated with analog solution concepts, a high susceptibility to errors and high costs. To date, there are no alternatives for actively, i.e. electrically, cooling or heating the boxes.

Tec4Med has now developed and applied for a patent for an energy-efficient cooling technology that enables companies to actively transport products for the first time in order to maintain the cold chain during transportation over the last mile. With this product development, the start-up is creating unprecedented infrastructure independence for companies in the pharmaceutical products sector.

This innovation also allows the Internet of Things to be integrated into a holistic and process-optimizing system solution for the first time. For example, the Nelumbox collects data on the climate conditions inside and outside the box. This data can be automatically controlled, viewed and monitored via the internet and cloud. This enables the user to be informed directly in the event of a deviation from the prescribed cooling temperature. This is an important control mechanism for protecting temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical products and samples and ensures that the cold chain is not interrupted at any time and that a test series is not jeopardized.

The pre-seed investment made by Bito Campus in December 2017 laid the first foundation stone for a strong, future-oriented partnership. With the follow-up investment from the seed round and the addition of Hessen Kapital I as a strong financial investor, the series transfer of the Nelumbox and the product expansion to other areas are now to be financed. as