Presentation: Fuelling the next frontier of textile innovation: Securing investment for early development

Developing a new, disruptive technology, whether it’s a new fibre, ingredient or chemistry is a high-stakes endeavour that requires not just technical brilliance but a strategic financial blueprint. This session will explore the funding landscape for the next generation of textile solutions. We bring together the leaders who have successfully raised capital for innovations and the organisations and investors who specialise in industrial transformation from lab to pilot scale. Panellists will divulge practical insights on how to bridge the gap between technical proof-of-concept and the commercial reality of a global supply chain. 
Marte Hentschel VORN
Jatin Kumar Materials Scientist and Deep-Tech Entrepreneur

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Marte Hentschel

VORN

Professor & Serial Entrepreneur

Marte Hentschel is a professor, serial entrepreneur and sustainability expert specialising in platform creation and collaborative innovation formats in the fashion and textile industry. Her work focuses on enabling transformation processes through co-creation and the application of digital technologies across design, development and production systems.

At VORN, she leads innovation and partnerships across a portfolio of publicly funded R&D projects spanning circular design principles, future of manaufacturing and material innovation, bringing first-hand experience in moving technical concepts from lab-stage development toward pilot and commercial scale. At BSP she is professor for sustainable fashion and R&D project lead.

VORN – The Berlin Fashion Hub is a physical and digital space for collaborative innovation with the goal of creating positive impact across fashion and culture. VORN provides access to community services, co-working, event and exhibition spaces, applied R&D projects and scaling programmes for innovators, fashion companies, research institutions, academia and public and private initiatives working toward a net-positive fashion future.

At BSP Berlin, the Faculty of Creative Business combines business management expertise with a deep understanding of innovation processes in the creative industries. The Bachelor's programme Sustainable Fashion Design and Management prepares future designers and managers to take responsibility for shaping a fair and sustainable fashion system, with a strong focus on ecological, cultural and social sustainability across all stages of the value chain.

Links:

www.linkedin.com/in/marte-hentschel
www.instagram.com/marte.hentschel
vorn-hub.com
www.fakultaet-creative-business.de

Jatin Kumar

Materials Scientist and Deep-Tech Entrepreneur

Materials scientist and deep-tech entrepreneur

Jatin Kumar is a materials scientist and deep-tech entrepreneur based in Singapore and is one of the earliest practitioners of AI-driven materials discovery and its translation into commercial products. Most recently, he co-founded Xinterra and served as CTO, where he invented and commercialised COzTERRA, a CO2-capturing textile treatment taken from an idea with no data to industrial scale in fourteen months. He now works with materials innovators and manufacturers across the full problem, from inventing a new material to the harder task of turning it into something an industry will actually adopt.