TUD Research Team BeLEAF awarded at BoOst DemoDays Pitch Competition

BeLEAF, a spin-off project from the Dresden Integrated Center for Applied Physics and Photonic Materials (IAPP) and the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP) at TU Dresden, has been recognized with the ‘Greatest Potential’ Jury Award at the BoOst DemoDays Pitch Competition. The award marks a major milestone for the team, underscoring growing confidence among potential investors in both the commercial viability of the business model and the feasibility of the underlying technology.

Launched in fall 2025 with funding from the Joachim Herz Foundation through its Innovate! Academy program, BeLEAF focuses on capturing CO₂ directly from the atmosphere to generate negative emissions – a process known as direct air capture (DAC). Recently, the team (Dr. Anna-Lena Hofmann, Tommy Meier, and Dr. Hans Kleemann) successfully completed the incubator program of the Start-Up Factory boOst.

“It was an intensive program covering entrepreneurship, company building, pitching, and team development. At the same time, it proved incredibly valuable in preparing us for the next stage,” says Anna-Lena, who leads BeLEAF’s technology transfer and market development activities. Throughout the program, the BeLEAF team also received strong support from a YETI team, which conducted extensive customer and partner interviews to evaluate the project’s commercial potential in depth.

Alongside validating the business case, BeLEAF achieved a major technological milestone with the development of a first demonstrator for its CO₂ filter technology. “It is inspiring to finally hold this demonstrator in your hands,” says Tommy, who leads the scientific and technological development of the filter system. “But beyond that, it serves a much larger purpose. We have built an entire measurement and analysis system around it to evaluate the physical parameters that underpin our business case.” The filter system is based on the Leaftronics technology pioneered at the IAP. According to Tommy, the rapid progress would not have been possible without the collaboration with the Chair of Energy Process Engineering at TU Dresden, whose expertise in gas separation technology has been instrumental to the project’s advancement and validation.

With substantial technological progress and valuable economic insights gained over the past months, the BeLEAF team is now preparing for the next phase: transferring the technology from the laboratory into real-world applications and establishing a scalable solution for economically and ecologically sustainable negative CO₂ emissions.

Contact:
Dr. Hans Kleemann
Institute of Applied Physics (IAP)
Integrated Center for Applied Physics und Photonic Materials (IAPP)
TU Dresden
Tel.: +49 351 463-43379
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