About
A Hamburg firm built around one unglamorous problem.
Extraordinary research is filed, published, and then left in place. Blue Hat Investments exists to do the commercial work that turns it into something people can buy.
Our story
Blue Hat Investments GmbH is registered in Hamburg, Germany, with offices in the Chilehaus in the historic Kontorhausviertel.
The firm was founded on a simple observation: institutions are excellent at producing technology and structurally poor at commercializing it. Tech-transfer offices are under-resourced, inventors are rewarded for the next grant rather than the next product, and conventional venture capital arrives only once a company already exists.
We sit in that gap. We take positions early, we fund the unglamorous industrialization work, and we stay operationally involved through launch. That means fewer deals and deeper involvement in each one.
We work in English and German, with institutions across Europe and North America, and we structure deals under German and international law depending on the counterparty.
Background
Naser Arifi is an entrepreneur and technology-commercialisation specialist with extensive experience in international business, circular-economy innovation and venture development.
He founded Apex International in 2006 and later co-founded DePla Regeneration — now RecycLABS, a University of Hamburg-linked chemical-recycling venture that won first prize in the Idea category at the 2022 Hamburg Innovation Awards.
He currently leads the commercial development of GAITRA, an AI-powered biomechanical intelligence and gait-monitoring platform, and serves as an adviser to Unplugged, a technology venture associated with the University of Southern Denmark.
Through Blue Hat Investments, Naser works with researchers, inventors and technology-transfer offices at leading universities and research institutions across Europe, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States — identifying promising technologies, validating their market potential and building commercially successful spin-outs.
Leadership
The team
Full team biographies to follow — additional entries below are placeholders.
Naser Arifi
Managing Director
Entrepreneur and technology-commercialisation specialist. Founded Apex International, co-founded RecycLABS, and leads GAITRA and Blue Hat Investments.
Head of Commercialization
Product & Go-to-Market
Placeholder biography. Hardware product and manufacturing background, with launches across consumer and industrial categories. Owns go-to-market execution.
Head of Technology Assessment
Technical Due Diligence
Placeholder biography. Research career followed by applied engineering roles. Runs technical due diligence, TRL assessment, and freedom-to-operate review.
Why this matters
Research that stays in the lab helps no one — not the institution that funded it, not the researchers who built it, and not the people it was meant to serve.
Public and institutional money produced this technology. Leaving it unused is a quiet, compounding waste. Every licensed process, every spinout, and every launched product returns value to the originating institution and puts the work in front of the people it was intended for.
That is the whole argument for what we do, and the standard we hold each deal to.