20 July 2026 | Tübingen

Cyber Valley AI Incubator announces batch #8 winners

Emerging AI start-ups take the stage at Demo Day

Photo: A. Posada @MPI-IS

The Cyber Valley AI Incubator batch 8 has successfully concluded with its Demo Day, where seven emerging AI ventures presented their innovations to an audience of founders, investors, researchers, industry leaders, and members of the wider AI community. Made possible through the generous support of the Carl Zeiss Foundation (CSZ), the program continues to foster research-driven AI entrepreneurship by helping innovators transform cutting-edge ideas into startup ventures.

Hosted at Cyber Valley I (MvL1) in Tübingen, the event marked the culmination of weeks of intensive collaboration, expert-led workshops, and venture development. A highlight of the evening was the keynote address by Axel Sauer, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Black Forest Labs, who shared insights into the future of AI innovation and the evolution of visual intelligence. Throughout the incubator, participants transformed early-stage ideas into startup-ready ventures through hands-on training in startup formation, investment strategy, legal considerations for AI, product prototyping, customer discovery, and persuasive communication.

Photo: A. Posada @MPI-IS

The event opened with welcome remarks from Christoph Keplinger and Leila Masri of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS), who reflected on the achievements of batch 8 and the growing impact of the AI Incubator. Phil-Alan Gärtig of the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung, the program’s principal sponsor, highlighted the foundation’s continued commitment to advancing innovation and research-driven entrepreneurship.

In his keynote, “Towards Visual Intelligence: From Image Generation to Physical AI,” Axel Sauer explored the evolution of generative AI and the development of increasingly capable AI models. Drawing on the work of Black Forest Labs, he shared perspectives on the rapid progress of AI technologies and their potential to shape the future of visual intelligence and embodied AI systems.

Photo: A. Posada @MPI-IS

The spotlight then turned to the batch 8 teams, who presented their final venture pitches before an expert jury consisting of:

Daisy Paiva (ZEISS Ventures)
Franziska Ivens (Silicon Allee Venture Lab at Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute)
Christoph Keplinger (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)

With an exceptionally high standard across all seven teams, selecting the winners proved to be a challenging task.