Okay.
Clean Nature is a start-up company working on developing artificial intelligence based technologies to optimize de-icing salt dispersal. This road salt is very harmful and affects water quality. my colleagues and I began to work on the idea four years ago. We were three female students who met at university. As masters and doctoral students, we developed a concept and got involved in various innovation challenges, like the AquaHacking Challenge. Our solution, which uses artificial intelligence, showed a lot of potential.
I' m going to explain the problem faced by start-ups. When you're at university and you come up with a promising idea, there is mentoring, and it's possible to obtain support as a university researcher, for example. However, once you leave university, it's hard to get funding. Financial support is available to more highly developed companies, but a company has to have existed for two or three years and have a certain number of full-time employees, which is very difficult for a start-up.
So I would say that the first barrier is finding the support needed to be able to spend all our time and resources on growing the company. For Clean Nature, there were just the three of us, with only one managing to obtain a postdoctoral fellowship. As a result, she was able to work on the company's technological development.
Technological development is not the only hurdle. A business model also has to be developed. We have a good understanding of this model, and we've worked on it. However, if we had adequate support and resources, we clearly could have made much more progress on its technological development.