Sightwise GmbH is Officially Founded

How We Launched Sightwise with a Weekend, a Deadline, and a Dream

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You know those moments when everything changes? When an idea stops being just an idea and starts becoming something real? For us, that moment came on a Friday night, deep in the optics lab at the Institute for Measurement and Automatic Control.

We were three friends—Philipp Middendorf, Nils Melchert, and Kolja Hedrich—bound together by one vision: to take what we’d been working on in our dissertations and bring it to the real world. We were obsessed with one question: How can we revolutionize industrial quality assurance using AI and synthetic data?

Then came the spark.

Our professor, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reithmeier, mentioned a funding opportunity at the local high-tech incubator, SMINT@Hanover. But there was a catch—the application was due in two days. It was one of those make-or-break moments. We had a choice: let the opportunity slip by, or put everything on the line.

So, what did we do? We pulled all-nighters, fueled by nothing but ambition and caffeine, and crafted a proposal in 48 hours. We hit "submit" with minutes to spare.

And then came the waiting. We didn’t know what would happen. But a few weeks later, we got the call that changed everything: we had secured €121,000 in technology funding. That was it. That was the moment Sightwise was born.

With the funding, supported by NBank and Starting Business at Leibniz University Hannover, we finally had the resources to turn our proof-of-concept into reality. From April 2023 to the end of the year, we worked on proving that our technology—using synthetic data and AI—could revolutionize industrial image processing.

We weren’t just building a company. We were creating the future of industrial AI, one where businesses could automate quality assurance without being held back by data limitations. This funding was the first domino that set everything else in motion.

And here’s the thing: we’re just getting started.