From Sustainable Solar to Intelligent Machines: Deep Tech Award 2026 Finalists in Advanced Manufacturing

Berlin has established itself as a powerhouse for industrial innovation in Europe. What was once a city rebuilding its manufacturing base has evolved into a dynamic hub where deep tech startups are rethinking how physical products are made. The city’s blend of world-class research institutions, engineering talent, and entrepreneurial culture is enabling a new generation of companies to take on manufacturing’s hardest problems.

The Advanced Manufacturing category of the Deep Tech Award 2026 reflects this transformation. This year’s finalists – SOLYCO, Endless Industries, and Ailoys – demonstrate how material science, additive manufacturing, and artificial intelligence are converging to reshape industrial production at its core.

The Team of SOLYCO

Eliminating toxic materials from the solar industry

For SOLYCO, the path to innovation stretches back three decades. Founder Dr. Lars Prodlowski started his first solar company in a Berlin garage in 1996. But as solar scaled into a technology producing over a billion modules per year, a troubling contradiction remained: panels marketed as green products still relied on lead-based soldering.

“Now the global PV industry has almost reached the Terawatt era – 1000 times bigger than in 2010 – and still lead is used in solar modules. And unfortunately, nobody really cares,“ the team notes. “But we do care.“

SOLYCO’s answer is TECC-Connect®, the world’s first completely silver-, lead-, and bismuth-free cell interconnection technology for PV modules. Rather than soldering, the patented process bonds plastic-coated copper wires to solar cells through controlled heat and gentle pressure. It works on zero busbar cell designs, copper and aluminum metallized cells, and even temperature-sensitive perovskite materials – opening pathways to higher efficiencies and lower costs across the industry. Founded in 2023 and based at the Urban Tech Republic at the former Tegel Airport, SOLYCO TECC is preparing for its first commercial product launch in the second half of 2026.

The Leadership Team of Endless Industries

Automating the production of high-performance composites

Endless Industries is tackling the complexity and cost of producing fibre-reinforced composite parts. Carbon fibre composites offer exceptional strength at low weight – invaluable in aerospace, motorsport, medical devices, and sports equipment – but traditional production has always required expensive moulds, significant manual labour, and deep specialist expertise.

The company’s origins lie in academic research. CTO Mathias wrote his PhD on the underlying technology, and after his defence the founding question was simple: rather than let the findings gather dust, build something with them. “At its core, our story is about bridging research and application: taking strong scientific results, building a team around them, and bringing the technology to industry.“

The result is a digital manufacturing system integrating material, print head, and software into a single automated platform. Beyond industrial applications, the technology helps orthopaedic technicians produce customised prosthetic and orthotic components more efficiently – reducing manual workload and freeing time for direct patient care. The company’s long-term ambition is to become the European powerhouse for thermoplastic composite manufacturing.

Sergei Altynbaev, Founder of Ailoys

Giving machines a nervous system

Where SOLYCO and Endless Industries are transforming what gets made and how, Ailoys is focused on what machines can understand about themselves during production. The founder spent more than 15 years in industrial environments, accumulating over 30 material science patents, and repeatedly encountering the same paradox: factories were full of advanced equipment, yet defects were only discovered after the process. “If machines could understand the physical signals of the material in real time, they could prevent failures before they happen.“

Ailoys builds edge AI devices that listen to acoustic signals generated when materials deform – revealing stress, micro-cracks, and structural changes long before defects become visible. Around 70 % of global manufacturing still runs on legacy machines without any real sensory intelligence. “In many ways, these factories are operating without a nervous system. Ailoys is building that nervous system.“

The same underlying physics applies across wire drawing, CNC machining, welding, and many other processes – giving Ailoys a broad platform for industrial transformation and a vision of factories that don’t just automate, but genuinely learn.

Berlin: a hub for manufacturing's next chapter

All three finalists point to Berlin as a critical enabler of their work. Endless Industries highlights TU Berlin’s bridge between academia and industry; SOLYCO credits the Urban Tech Republic community and Berlin’s policy environment; Ailoys points to the city’s intersection of AI expertise and engineering culture.

Whether eliminating toxic materials from the energy transition, automating composite production, or embedding intelligence into industrial machines, Berlin’s Advanced Manufacturing finalists are building technologies with the potential to reshape how the world makes things – for decades to come.