Some days don’t just feel productive, instead they feel directional. Yesterday was one of those days for us at vGreens.

At the official funding-award ceremony Grüne Gründung, we received a funding commitment of more than 476,000€ for our project „LiqBotanics“, following our successful involvement in the fourth call of the funding-competition!

The official funding notice was handed over by Oliver Krischer, Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Transport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, during an inspiring event at the Startup Village in Jülich.

The setting could not have been more fitting: Surrounded by young and curious founders, bold ideas and institutions that actually want to see innovation happen, the ceremony felt like much more than just a formal funding milestone.

It was a strong, tangible signal: in NRW, sustainable, technology-driven innovation isn’t just welcomed. Much more it’s actively built, backed and pushed forward.

Where Energy Meets Entrepreneurship

The day unfolded at the Brainergy Park in Jülich, a place where research, industry and startups collide in the best possible way. Between a guided tour through the already growing campus, countless conversations with fellow founders, shared food and drinks, and a lineup of sharp startup pitches, one thing became crystal clear: this ecosystem is designed for ideas that think long-term and scale responsibly.

Pitching LiqBotanics in this environment felt spot on. Not because it’s loud or flashy, but because it tackles a real, structural problem with serious technological ambition, and just enough boldness to challenge the problematic status quo:

Fixing Strawberries Where It Actually Matters

European strawberry production faces a problem that’s easy to overlook but hard to ignore once you see it: Over generations, plant vitality declines, diseases accumulate and the availability of high-quality plant material becomes increasingly unpredictable.

The consequences ripple through the entire supply chain, creating uncertainty for growers and pushing sustainability further out of reach.

 LiqBotanics started with a simple but uncomfortable question: what if the real bottleneck isn’t how strawberries are grown, but how the plants themselves are produced?

From Lab Benches to Intelligent Production

With LiqBotanics, we are rethinking plant propagation at its core. Instead of manual, repetitive lab work, we are building an AI-automated, bioreactor-based tissue culture platform designed for industrial reality.

A system that dramatically reduces manual workload, accelerates production cycles and delivers uniform, high-quality plant material at scale.

By integrating bioreactor systems, adaptive robotics and data-driven monitoring, we create a controlled, intelligent production environment that preserves biological quality while enabling reliable, local production. We are not just growing plants, we are modernizing how plants are produced.

In short: fewer manual steps, more intelligence, and a system that scales.

A Clear Vision for NRW

Our ambition goes far beyond this single project: We want to help position NRW as a leading hub for automated, sustainable plant production, where biology, AI and robotics come together to build resilient food systems for the future.

Receiving this funding is a major milestone on that journey. It adds confidence, sharpens focus and reinforces why we started building in the first place! We’re deeply grateful for the trust and support. It means a lot to see our ideas not only encouraged, but truly believed in!