Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem do you solve?
Treesense: Watering urban trees is becoming increasingly important due to climate change. Cities, municipalities, and housing associations are contracting out irrigation services to arborists, landscape gardeners, and tree experts are often involved as well. The biggest problem is that currently, decisions about whether irrigation is necessary are based solely on the weather. The administrative effort involved is time-consuming, and there's no guarantee that the trees are being watered according to their actual needs. This, in turn, means that either too much water is used or the trees die due to drought, which can be expensive.
We developed a wearable for trees, a sensor that provides a real-time overview of drought stress in trees. The data indicates remotely and at any time whether watering is necessary – without the need for time-consuming expert visits. Our software serves as predictive maintenance for urban trees, as the decision to water is data-based and made automatically.
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Treesense: Currently, soil moisture sensors are used, if at all, to estimate whether the top layer of soil has enough water. However, these sensors don't take into account many factors such as soil texture, tree quality, or root depth. Treesense Pulse reveals the tree's actual response by monitoring the water balance in the tree's xylem channels. This also represents a completely new solution for science to detect heat stress in trees across the board.
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Treesense: As a forestry scientist, Giancarlo began researching a solution for monitoring tree drought in 2013, with the aim of discovering additional indicators for forest fire prevention. The idea of measuring tree resistance actually originated in medical technology, and this is how he came into contact with Julius at the Heinz Nixdorf Chair for Biomedical Electronics at the TUM Thanks to the commitment of Prof. Hayden and Dr. Brischwein, we were able to develop Treesense into a start-up project with the EXIST grant and get to know each other.
Treesense: Partnership with Munich Public Utilities
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Treesense: Countless! We initially had a tech push, meaning an innovation, without really knowing the market. Through many discussions with experts and users, we were ultimately able to identify the problem of urban tree irrigation. Currently, we're also experiencing a global microchip shortage, so we had to develop a temporary product, which set us back a few months. Julius was ultimately able to manage this incredibly well in hardware development.
Munich Startup: Where would you like to be in one year, where in five years?
Treesense: We currently have pilot projects with small quantities in the market with several major customers. In the B2B market, we can sell our hardware and software to tree experts and landscape gardeners. The next milestone is comprehensive monitoring for a city or municipality. Ideally, we want to secure such a project this year. Our connections with cities like Madrid, Munich, and Vienna, and especially our partnerships with municipal organizations like the Munich Public Utilities, are helping us achieve this.
In the long term, we want to establish the technology as a standard for evaluating tree vitality. How exciting would it be if we could quantify the effects of climate change on our trees, allowing a direct comparison between today and five years from now? So, it goes beyond urban tree irrigation. How do we irrigate efficiently in agriculture so that the soil isn't contaminated with fertilizers even in 15 years? How dry are the trees in our forests, really, and what does that mean for the risk of forest fires? These are exciting questions of sustainability, and we want to make our contribution.
“The startup network you can build in Munich is immense.”
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Treesense: Overall, it's been very positive. The proximity to TUM and the startup center with our startup advisor Carmen Baur has given us a boost. We're very grateful for the help. On the other hand, we've also noticed that many stakeholders aren't necessarily focused on trees—we're more likely to fight our way through that and try to raise awareness that sustainability in traditional industries can't be implemented so quickly with the classic unicorn case. However, we love talking to many other startups that essentially face similar challenges to us. The startup network you can build in Munich is immense.
Munich Startup: Risk or security?
Treesense: In our experience, scientists generally play it safe and prefer to test every hypothesis once too often rather than too little. However, we've learned that we can only achieve our goals if we go all-in. We've been and continue to be in situations where we don't know what might happen. As soon as we solve a critical problem that could kill us, the next one pops up in less than two hours. That's what life as a founder is all about.
