Take a medium-sized German city that has its own airport and is already home to technology companies such as Airbus and ESA, take a private university that is looking for renewal and thus a buyer, take an international, technology- and start-up-oriented outlook, and take an entrepreneur who has developed several high-tech companies including Acronis active in the cybersecurity field that in August 2024 was acquired by the EQT investment fund, and you get a perfect synthesis of education, innovation, entrepreneurship, and research.
The entrepreneur is Serg Bell, a Singaporean born in the former Soviet Union, who in 2021 decided to take over the private university based in Bremen, which has now become Constructor University and is associated with activities to support the development of start-ups such as incubation and acceleration programmes and also with venture capital investment activities.
Bell, who is officially the founder & chairman of the board of governors of Constructor Group, chairman of the board of governors of Constructor University, explains to Startupbusiness the genesis and reasons for this project in which he is investing, looking to the future: “We have been operating since 2021 and we are therefore in the third cycle of studies in which approximately two thousand students of 121 different nationalities participate. I am an entrepreneur of tech companies and with this approach I continue to operate, the University is an important component of the strategy to develop technology companies, to train talent, to also access the relationship with other universities. Research is the future and you can’t do it without talent and it is important that research and talent are in one place, on a campus like Constructor University and where they can also develop their ideas and start-ups’.
Today, Constructor University is considered one of the thirty best universities in the world for academic programmes and PhDs, has an alumni community with more than eight thousand members from over 110 nationalities, is ranked by Times Higher Education 2024 third among the best international universities, 57th among the youngest universities and first among private universities based in Germany.
Students, scientists, lecturers and then entrepreneurs and investors are the figures who together give strength to the Constructor University community where subjects such as computer science and data science but also artificial intelligence nano science are studied.
“Our goal is to accelerate the development of science and to do so with a structure that must eventually become financially sustainable, at this stage we continue to finance it but we want to make it independent albeit in a non-profit configuration, we want to act pragmatically and define a reality capable of being very effective in pursuing objectives that look to the future.
The academic activities are led by Oznur Bell who is Constructor knowledge CEO and Constructor University Chancellor who says: “we work on different projects, on artificial intelligence-based tools to support research and we also work with companies that want to do research with us, what is key in our strategy is to build, consolidate and grow our reputation.
This year, 750 more students enrolled at Constructor University than the previous year, and this is progress that Oznur Bell sees as extremely promising in view of reaching the goal of having 5,000 students within the next five years: “we develop various activities to make our university known, we naturally use digital promotion campaigns, but we also leverage our alumni community and participate in academic summits”.
The tuition fee is formally around EUR 20,000 but there are scholarships that reduce it considerably and also funds that use the concept of brain capital by offering students the opportunity to attend at a very low cost and only start paying for their studies after they have started working.
Then there is the entrepreneurial side of which Oznur Bell emphasises the importance: ‘The acceleration programme leverages the expertise of our lecturers, in this way we can expand the value for all and that is why access to resources and programmes is also open to start-ups that are not necessarily born from students at the university but also come from outside.
These start-ups are the ones that gave rise to the demo day, which took place on 12 September 2024 and was attended by entrepreneurs and teams from different countries: Germany, Romania, Colombia, Italy, UK, France, Sweden, USA, Switzerland, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Start-ups with high-tech projects in various fields: from robotics to education, from artificial intelligence to quantum technology, from HR to beautytech.
Listening to the pitches were numerous investors and also a Nobel Prize winner, Konstantin Novoselovwho is chairman, Constructor Group strategic advisory Board, physicist, professor at the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials at the National University of Singapore and Nobel Prize winner for Physics in 2010, who also shared with the audience a vision of the concept of innovation and research that starts from the idea that one must always be ready to look at things from all angles, to have a broad vision and to abandon conventions and assumptions that often do not allow research to express itself to the full.
Both the demoday and the incubation programme were also attended by Italian entrepreneurs, as in the case of Victoria Ceccaroni CEO and founder of Deckx, which proposes a platform for human resources management aimed particularly at the world of developers, and Daniele Bernardini CEO of Cognivix, which develops innovative robotic solutions and is based between Germany and Italy. Winning the EUR 100,000 first prize, however, was South American start-up LingoQuesto, which has developed a system to support those wishing to learn a language through interactive conversations, which, according to the founders, who are also alumni of Constructor University, is a key aspect in accelerating learning and thus the ability to use the language being learnt.
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