About Us
Meet the ImpactNexus Team
Passionate about impact management and tech with a strong academic background and large network in the innovation ecosystem
Dr. Jannic Horne
CEO
Marie-Sophie Litz
CTO
Alexander Schabel
CSO
Dr. Constanze Trautwein
CPO
Hamidreza Keshavarz
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Vincent Reynaud
Senior Full Stack Developer
Oğuz Şerbetçi
CDO
Benjamin Huppert
On-Purpose Associate, Sales & Marketing
Shahrukh Khan
NLP Engineer
Gabriel Rios Lopez
Sales & Marketing Specialist
Hasan Çelik
Data Engineer
Our Advisors & Investors
Prof. Dr. Klaus Fichter
CEO Borderstep Institute, Professor for Entrepreneurship at Oldenburg University
Dr. Andrea Rösinger
Co-CEO FORCAM GmbH, Ex-SAP Executive
Ina Schlie
Ex-SAP Executive, Board Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG
Jörg Walden
Founder and former CEO of iPoint-systems GmbH, Founder CircularTree
Marcus Schaper
Ex-CIO E.ON & Ex-McKinsey
Christian Bacher
Vireo Ventures GmbH
Olga Kaus
Director Risk Performance & Business Continuity Management, BioNTech SE
Georg Rasinski
Ex-HERE Technologies & LG Electronics
Our story
2019 – The Guiding question
Sustainability, innovation, and entrepreneurship were topics we had been working on for years in our daily work and in our academic research. This joined interest brought Alexander, Constanze, Jannic and Klaus together with one leading question, how can we leverage technology to improve the sustainability impact of businesses?
Building on our past experiences we decided to join forces around this question and to build up ImpactNexus as a spin-off from the Borderstep Institute for Innovation & Sustainability.
2021 – Launching ImpactNexus
In January Marie, Oguz and Jannic started as a full-time team with the product development. We kicked off the technical product development with multiple design sprints with startups, investors, and others experts from the innovation ecosystem. In constant exchange with customers, we developed a first MVP for the assessment and measurement of impact in new ventures. Building on this, we were soon able to generate first customer interest for our impact assessment solutions.
In our discussions with customers, we also realized that many customers need support in the field of ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance). Accordingly, we decided to expand our offering. Today, we can offer support to individual ventures and portfolio owners in the field of ESG as well as impact. So customers can choose the level of support they need to increase their impact and mitigate social and environmental risks.
2020 – Building the foundation
Under the roof of the Borderstep Institute we began to set the foundations for ImpactNexus. We conducted an extensive customer discovery phase, developed and prototyped product concepts and applied for public support programs.
We were lucky to find Marie early on in the development of ImpactNexus and to convince her to join us. With her strong software development and mathematical background she helped us to experiment with first prototypes along her full-time job.
At the end of the year, we received approval for the EXIST grant from the German Ministry of Economics. This gave us the funds to kick off ImpactNexus as an independent venture in 2021 and we were able to recruit Oğuz with his strong background in machine learning and NLP.
