Campus Founders wants your startup to move in

The apartment is part of the pitch. At Campus Founders in Heilbronn, selected startup teams can spend twelve weeks building a business with coaching, workspace and somewhere to live. It is a practical response to a familiar founder problem: a promising product can disappear under rent, distractions and the sheer administrative business of getting started.

The offer invites a bigger question. Can a city make itself useful enough that entrepreneurs decide to stay? Campus Founders is testing that proposition through education, investment connections and a building called GRAVITY. The name leaves little room for doubt about the ambition. The interesting part is what happens after people are drawn inside.

A foundation’s bet on the founder next door

The Dieter Schwarz Foundation established Campus Founders in September 2018, initially aiming to encourage entrepreneurship among students and other people interested in starting businesses. Its home on Heilbronn’s Bildungscampus placed that work beside educational institutions. Courses, coaching and room to experiment were part of the offer from the beginning.

Oliver Hanisch has led the organization since 2019. His background includes fourteen years in Silicon Valley and co-founding German Accelerator. That experience helps explain the combination: local institution-building with an international address book. Campus Founders wants the region’s aspiring entrepreneurs to encounter people who have already wrestled with hiring, sales and investors.

Its users span several groups that often meet only briefly: students exploring entrepreneurship, startup teams trying to build a viable business, and established companies looking for new ideas. Campus Founders organizes repeated contact between them. For a corporate innovator, that can mean bringing a problem into a structured challenge; for a founder, it can mean finding a mentor who understands the customer.

GRAVITY gets a street address

The physical commitment became harder to miss on December 3, 2025, when Campus Founders and the foundation officially opened GRAVITY. Its 7,000 square metres include more than 200 workstations, 21 meeting and workshop rooms, event spaces and a media studio. Twenty-one startups presented at the accompanying Demo Day.

Nearby institutions include Hochschule Heilbronn, the local presences of TU Munich and ETH Zurich, and the programming school 42. The geographical logic is straightforward: put people developing knowledge close to people attempting to sell something built from it. A short walk cannot settle a commercial question, but it can make the first conversation easier.

The building is also a statement about patience. Entrepreneurship support requires somewhere to return after the launch party. Offices and event spaces make continued contact possible; the programs have to give that contact a purpose. The test is whether founders leave meetings with a clearer decision, a better experiment or a prospective buyer willing to take another call.

First, resist the urge to build

The Corporate Campus Challenge starts earlier than an accelerator. Its fourteen-week educational program places participants in interdisciplinary teams tackling problems supplied by corporate partners. The first six weeks explore the challenge. Solution design follows, then testing, iteration and a final pitch. That sequence gives curiosity a place on the timetable.

Participation is free, with a published workload of roughly seven to ten hours a week. Applicants join individually, and the program assembles the teams. The assignment is the partner’s challenge, so this is a route to learning entrepreneurial methods rather than a service for developing any personal idea. Its intended output is a partly validated prototype.

Founders ready to work on their own venture can look to the five-month Incubator. Its offer includes fifteen expert workshops, coaching and more than ten peer working sessions. The program emphasizes validating assumptions and creating a first minimum viable product. Batch six is advertised for November 2026 through March 2027.

That separation matters. Someone still asking whether a problem is worth solving needs different help from a team negotiating an enterprise pilot. Campus Founders’ expertise sits partly in teaching those distinctions. Moving from one program to another should mean the work has changed, rather than simply that another round of presentations has begun.

Free entry. Read the financing separately.

The current CF Accelerator brings together AI, cybersecurity and robotics. AI Founders has merged into it, with the organization citing a broader network as the reason. The program targets early B2B deep-tech companies with a working MVP and some traction. Participation is free and equity-free, but it requires a full-time commitment in Heilbronn.

The advertised assistance of up to €25,000 is a separate matter. Provided through financial partners, it is a milestone-linked loan with limited repayment obligations, interest and specified conditions. Teams that miss milestones may receive less. Free participation should therefore be understood separately from the financing agreement.

For a founder, time is another cost. Relocating and concentrating on the business can be valuable, but the format fits poorly with a full-time job or a team unable to attend. The published schedule for batch nine runs from September 30 to December 18, 2026; its listed August application deadline has already passed.

There are alternatives. UnternehmerTUM also offers free, equity-free incubation, and its XPLORE Venture Creator provides a part-time online route. Campus Founders’ appeal rests on the whole arrangement: place, peers, practical support and proximity to industry. A founder should compare that arrangement with the actual bottleneck in the business.

The venture studio writes a different cheque

The organizational plumbing explains some of the offer. Campus Founders gGmbH is the nonprofit hub supported by the foundation. Campus Founders Ventures GmbH operates the complementary Venture Studio and offers residency services. Education, investment and workspace can sit close together while carrying different terms.

The Venture Studio advertises up to €100,000 through a convertible loan agreement, alongside help with sales, teams and business development. It particularly seeks B2B startups using technology to solve problems for Mittelstand companies and larger corporations. Its stated model is to recycle investment proceeds into subsequent generations of startups.

Semorai provides a concrete example. In 2023, Campus Founders announced €100,000 of Venture Studio financing for the Karlsruhe-founded industrial AI startup. Semorai had already won a Golden Ticket into AI Founders at Heilbronn Slush’D. BORN2GROW separately invested another €100,000. These were investments in Semorai, not money raised by the hub.

Co-founder John Holzhauer attributed the team’s decision to move its main location to Heilbronn to the support, network and local AI activity. That is the regional proposition in miniature: give founders reasons to arrive, then enough useful relationships to reconsider leaving. One relocation does not establish a general success rate, but it shows what the model is trying to achieve.

The housemates have customer problems, too

DeepFile, a participant developing AI-assisted document search, offers a less financial account of the experience. Campus Founders’ November 2024 profile described the team learning to favor progress over perfection and likened shared living to an “Erasmus for entrepreneurs.” It is a memorable description of an otherwise rather earnest business-support service.

“Erasmus for entrepreneurs”

DeepFile’s co-living experience, as described in Campus Founders’ 2024 team profile

The useful lesson is modest: expose unfinished work to people who can help you improve it. In another participant account, recruitment startup NextStepHR emphasized testing early products in real situations and discussing obstacles openly. Tabularis.AI, which develops synthetic data technology, highlighted learning to prioritize and use expert connections. These are participant accounts, not independent measures of program impact.

The community rules are refreshingly concrete. Vendors and consultants cannot approach members to sell services unless invited. Slack promotion belongs in designated channels. Members are expected to answer questions and share useful knowledge. Someone has evidently considered what happens when a room full of founders becomes a room full of sales targets.

There is also dedicated support for female founders. Campus Founders describes a network of more than 100 women and a partnership with encourageventures covering mentoring, pitch events and access to business angels. The practical value lies in repeated opportunities to ask questions and receive feedback, especially when the relevant investor network is not already in a founder’s phone.

When the festival name stopped travelling

One documented interruption came from outside. In March 2026, Campus Founders announced that SLUSH had decided to discontinue the Slush’D series worldwide. Its Heilbronn festival chapter was closing. The organization responded with a TECH by Handelsblatt partnership and plans for a House of Startups connecting founders with investors and corporate decision-makers.

That change offers a useful lesson for anyone building a founder community: relationships need somewhere to go when an event format ends. The same announcement identified Campus Founders as a NXTGN Startup Factory partner and a RISE Europe member. Local contact and wider networks are meant to reinforce each other.

The parts a reader can copy are concrete: separate learning stages, test assumptions before polishing a product, put limits on unsolicited selling, and help peers without making every exchange a transaction. Copying the buildings and financial support would require a very different budget. For founders considering Heilbronn, the relevant question is smaller: would this place help you do the next difficult piece of work?