Frankfurt School Start-up Conformis receives Hessen Ideen Scholarship 2026

Conformis, a start-up founded by students at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, has been selected as one of twelve teams to receive the Hessen Ideen Scholarship 2026. The programme supports innovative start-up projects from Hessian universities by helping founders further develop their business ideas through financial support, tailored coaching and a comprehensive qualification programme.

The Conformis team – Niklas Fink, Jonathan Kaufmann, Moritz Landwehr and Wehad Salzburg – has developed an AI-powered platform that enables banks and financial institutions to manage regulatory compliance more efficiently.

Financial institutions are facing an ever-growing number of regulatory requirements, including DORA, MaRisk and European anti-money laundering regulations. As a result, compliance teams often spend months manually translating regulations into internal policies, documenting controls and preparing evidence for supervisors and auditors. Conformis addresses this challenge by allowing institutions to upload their existing policies and controls, select the relevant regulatory framework and receive a comprehensive, audit-ready gap analysis with actionable recommendations within minutes. The platform is designed to keep humans in control by ensuring that every AI-generated recommendation is fully traceable to the underlying source documents. With this approach, the team aims to make compliance processes faster, more cost-effective and more transparent while helping financial institutions meet increasingly complex regulatory requirements.

The Hessen Ideen Scholarship supports students, researchers, university staff and alumni from Hessian higher education institutions who are developing innovative business ideas. In addition to funding of up to €2,500 per person per month, participants benefit from workshops, individual coaching and access to a cross-university start-up network. This year, twelve start-up teams from eight Hessian universities were selected from a record 98 applications.

Frankfurt School congratulates Niklas Fink, Jonathan Kaufmann, Moritz Landwehr and Wehad Salzburg on receiving the Hessen Ideen Scholarship and wishes the team continued success in developing Conformis.

Applications for the next Hessen Ideen Scholarship cohort are now open. The application deadline for the January–June 2027 funding period is 10 September 2026.