Björn Stoffers

Bjoern Stoffers (OroraTech) withdraws from operational business

Published on Thu, 27.10.2022 – 09:02 CEST in Internals, covering OroraTech

In a personal post, the co-founder of the Munich-based earth observation startup OroraTech announced that he will be stepping back from the operational side of the business. But he will not retire completely - and will continue to work on future topics.

The backgrounds

"Dear friends, I am taking a break!"

With this sentence, OroraTech's co-founder introduced the announcement on the business network LinkedIn that he is withdrawing from the operational business. In his post, he summarizes the last five years, which for him have been "the journey of a lifetime". In the process, OroraTech has developed into an addiction for him, which above all costs time. In the future, he wants to spend more of it with his family and friends, but also travel more.

Nevertheless, he will remain with the Munich-based company - as co-founder, shareholder and consultant. It is also thanks to his expertise that OroraTech was able to develop from a rough idea to a company with more than 80 employees from 25 countries within just five years.

When we started drawing the first concepts for OroraTech in 2017, we had little clue what we were doing, but absolutely no doubts that we would make it.

Bjoern Stoffers, OroraTech

The founding team of Thomas Gruebler, Bjoern Stoffers, Florian Mauracher and Rupert Amann has dedicated itself to the early detection of forest and bush fires using space technology. To this end, OroraTech uses data from ESA earth observation satellites. Unfortunately, this data has gaps in the overflight times of certain regions, which severely limits the detection of wildfires. To improve the data available, the first of the company's own satellites, FOREST-1, was launched into space in January 2022. As Stoffers points out, this "exceeded our wildest expectations."

The data collected is analyzed using proprietary software that is already in use on all continents. This also involves long working days, as Bjoern Stoffers emphasizes in his post: "It is starting your day with a call to Australia and ending it with Canada." He is certain that the success would not have been possible without the team and the support of the board as well as the investors. His thanks are equally due to the European Space Agency (ESA), Google, NVIDIA and German Accelerator, among others.

So far, he has been cautious about his plans for the future - as you might expect. "When my energy is back, probably sometime next year, there will likely be a new challenge for me in the green tech sector."

Header Image Credit: Björn Stoffers
Written by M. Weissflog
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