A great success for students at TU Ilmenau: With their startup idea, Aditya Jethliya and Amrutha Govindarajula secured third place at the Startup Academy & Competition hosted by the European University Cyprus. The Summer School for Future Founders took place from 6 to 10 July 2026 in Nicosia, Cyprus, as part of the SUNRISE Alliance. The event brought together students, faculty members, mentors, and experts from SUNRISE partner universities to further develop innovative business ideas and foster international collaboration.
The European Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Program (BIP) focused on the further development of innovative business ideas, workshops, individual mentoring, interdisciplinary teamwork, and preparation for the final pitch before an international jury.
A total of 23 startup teams from the partner universities of the SUNRISE Alliance participated in the competition. TU Ilmenau was represented by three teams, which were mentored by Matthias Testa, a startup advisor at the Ilmkubator Startup Service at TU Ilmenau. The teams had previously emerged victorious from a pool of eleven applicant teams in an internal selection process conducted by the Ilmkubator.
The jury evaluated the business ideas based on criteria including degree of innovation, feasibility, business model, market potential, team performance, quality of the pitch, and potential social and economic impact. Dr. Dörte Gerhardt, head of the Research Services and Technology Transfer Department at TU Ilmenau, is delighted with the Ilmenau team’s success:
The fact that the Phenolyst team secured third place among 23 international teams demonstrates the successful work of the Ilmkubator Startup Service in raising awareness of entrepreneurship and supporting startup teams. Matthias Testa prepared the teams for the competition, accompanied them to Cyprus, and actively supported the BIP program on site.
Smart Image Analysis Tool for Medium-Sized Research Institutions
With their startup idea, Aditya Jethliya and Amrutha Govindarajula – as the interdisciplinary team “Phenolyst”– are addressing a key challenge in plant genetic research. To identify genes responsible for specific traits, researchers must phenotype thousands of plants – that is, systematically record their visible characteristics. The manual evaluation that has been the norm until now is extremely time-consuming and limits the scope of scientific research. Fully automated phenotyping systems, on the other hand, cost between 500,000 and two million euros, making them economically unfeasible for many medium-sized research institutions.
This is where Phenolyst comes in: The team is developing a “Phenotyping-as-a-Service” platform that uses modern computer vision techniques to automatically extract plant traits from image data. The solution processes images from customers’ existing facilities – no special high-throughput systems are required – and provides structured data for genetic analysis. This makes automated phenotyping significantly more cost-effective and accessible to a larger number of research institutions.
Interdisciplinary collaboration with a common goal
Aditya Jethliya developed the technical foundation of the platform as part of his master’s thesis in the Research in Computer Systems Engineering program at the TU Ilmenau. His image analysis pipeline eliminates a major bottleneck in plant genetic research by enabling precise high-throughput phenotyping. Today, he works as a research assistant in the Data-intensive Systems and Visualization Group (dAI.sy), led by Prof. Patrick Mäder, on further developing the technology.
The winning team also includes Amrutha Govindarajula, a student in the Master’s program in International Business Economics at the TU Ilmenau. As a student research assistant in the dAI.sy department, she is part of the Flora Incognita research group. Together, Amrutha and Aditya combine technological innovation with business expertise and aim to make modern plant phenotyping accessible to research institutions of all sizes.
Contact
Dr. Dörte Gerhardt
Division of Research Service and Technology Transfer