Company: Aiku Technologies GmbH

Founder: Soraya Rosadha and Siegfried Eckstedt

Founding date November: 2022

Industry and company: Artificial intelligence; pharmaceutical and healthcare

What drives you? What is your motto?

Entrepreneurship is a journey. Keep your vision in mind and make sure you have the right support.

What is your start-up about and what is special about it?

We support the entire process of successfully applying AI solutions in the company. Our solutions are customer-specific and tailor-made.

Speed and efficiency are our values: from concept to prototype in 10 working days. As one of the largest data providers in the pharmaceutical industry, we know the gold standard of pharma data and best application practices.

What are your first successes?

We value small and big successes. The founding of our company in 2022 was an important milestone. Since then, we have been continuously serving our customers. This year, we were honored with the Futuremakers Award 2023 in the "Business Progress" category.

What is your professional background?

Soraya has experience in marketing and communications consulting for B2B software companies and oil and gas in Singapore.

Siegfried worked in Germany on digital transformation, data science, software development and AI.

After our freelance experience, we founded our company in 2022.

What was the trigger for you to start your own company?

Becoming an entrepreneur often feels more like a gut feeling and instinct. On the other hand, as entrepreneurs we can have a greater and positive impact on society. With this perspective in mind, we build our company day by day.

Who has advised you, who are your helpers and mentors?

We enjoy learning from institutions and communities such as Wirtschaftsförderung Wiesbaden, Futuremakers from Standard Chartered Bank and the Sie-Gründet Verband.

We also receive help from mentors on topics such as business, technology and AI in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.

How did you experience the first few days as founders?

As we are a couple, it was natural for us to work together as a team. Living life as we are is fulfilling, even if it can be challenging.

We have learned to start with what we have, right where we are. Along the way, we find ways to work things out and the community supports us.

What was your biggest challenge and how did you overcome it?

One of the biggest challenges is keeping the right attitude.

Being positive, resilient and flexible is key to mastering this journey.

There is a lot to learn and many challenges in the first few years of building a company. It is important to keep the vision in mind.

How do you draw attention to your company? What is your best marketing idea?

We focus on building a like-minded community. This means we meet people, communities and associations in person and stay in touch via social media.

We also bring our thoughts and insights to the industry through conferences, roundtables and discussions.

How did you finance your start-up?

We invested our own capital in the company.

What dream would you still like to realize?

The dreams are already there. We are living the life we wanted to live and the process of building our company feels very natural and exciting.

We want to get more people excited about AI and show them how it can positively change our lives, and that is exactly what is happening.

Please complete the following sentence: If we had more time we would...

... realize new business ideas.

What is your special tip: What would you recommend to founders?

We encourage founders to start with the resources that are currently available to them and to test ideas.

Sometimes we don't realize that we are good enough for it.