Student Tech Track
About
STT is a 10 week program designed to bring together technology and business students at the Bildungscampus, encouraging them to collaborate on real-world challenges in a positive environment
Where does it start?
STT is designed to support you at the very beginning of your entrepreneurial journey.
It’s the right place to start when:
- You’re someone with skills and passion for entrepreneurship but no concrete idea yet, and/or
- You are interested in building prototypes.
STT helps you explore, validate, and gain the confidence needed to take your first steps.
Schedule for 10 weeks of STT
How it works
Choose a Role
Software Engineer: This role is responsible for turning an idea into a functioning, testable, and usable digital product. The software engineer develops the technical solution, implements key product functions, and ensures that the system is reliable, maintainable, and expandable. The goal is to deliver value quickly without compromising technical quality, stability, and security.
AI/ Data Engineer: This role is responsible for ensuring that the team can use AI in a meaningful, robust, and targeted manner. The AI Engineer translates problems and requirements into suitable AI approaches, builds data-driven prototypes and proof-of-concepts, and evaluates their performance, feasibility, and limitations. The goal is to provide AI not “just as a feature,” but as a functioning, validatable solution component.
Business Strategist: This role is responsible for ensuring that the team does not develop “into the blue,” but systematically learns what customers really need and what they would pay for. Validating assumptions about the target group, benefits, and willingness to pay is their core task. To create the basis for business decisions.
Choose a Challenge
We provide 3-5 predefined challenges for each batch. You will get a detailed description of the challenge in the onboarding week.
Example Challenge: Companies want to build RAG systems and AI agents, but most fail due to missing infrastructure.
Data already exists in S3, data lakes, enterprise tools and databases. Embeddings change, retrieval quality degrades, permissions break, and non-text data like PDFs or images is hard to search.
Your challenge is to define a startup opportunity in the space of search & retrieval infrastructure for AI-native applications.
As one example, consider building an embedding-based search layer on top of existing object storage (e.g. S3) with multimodal support and embedding versioning. This is not about creating a new vector database, but about operating retrieval systems reliably on existing data.
Commit as a team
Team Composition: During the onboarding week, you will need to form teams. Each team must include at least all three roles (business strategist, AI engineer, and software engineer).
Commit on Challenge: Choose one of the given challenges together as a team.
Develop a Prototype & Business Case
Get Started! Execute on given deliverables during the 10 weeks.
Program Highlights:
- Mentoring: Opportunity to arrange one-to-one meetings with technical and business coaches.
- Groups Sessions: Learning session in which each team shares their progress and receives feedback from peers.
- Prototyping Tools: Budget for various tools to build a prototype.
- Demo Day: Show your progress and present your prototype.
Key Benefits:
- Learn: Develop entrepreneurial skills that complement your academic curriculum.
- Apply: Work on real-world problems and transform ideas into viable start-ups.
- Grow: Grow as a team through challenging situations and learn from your mistakes.
Good to known.
Student Tech Track is designed to identify top talent on campus and build a thriving community of future entrepreneurs in Heilbronn. You will be equipped with practical tools to validate and launch your deep tech start-up after graduation.
Deep Tech Start-ups work on advanced or emerging technology in order to address deep complex societal/global challenges that result in creation of transformative and extremely valuable solutions.
Yes! The program requires in-person participation as we organize events and workshops in Heilbronn. Unfortunately, it is not possible to participate virtually in the Student Tech Track.
The Student Tech Track is structured into two parts: Learn and Apply. In the first part, participants gain a foundational understanding of technologies, market trends and opportunities. In the second part, you validate your start-up idea through practical workshops.
During the project phase the time commitment will depend on your motivation, but at least 10 hours per week.
Primary target group are students pursuing a Master's degree. We want a diverse spectrum of backgrounds (tech; business; design) it helps to create an environment of open discussion and diverse ideas. Therefore, anyone interested in Software & AI technologies into application can apply.
No, the program is free of charge.
No, TUM Venture Labs does not offer funding. We focus on providing knowledge, mentorship, and general support to develop your venture.
If you have further questions, please reach out to us at: software-ai.heilbronn@tum-venture-labs.de
Apply · until Mar 7, 2026
Join the upcoming #Batch3 of STT now.
