Germany — Every night, streetlights switch on across a city. They illuminate the streets at the same brightness, whether anyone is there to need them or not. Because they have worked this way for decades, most people simply accept it as part of how a city functions.

But Adrian Rhaese had a question.

Why has city infrastructure remained largely unchanged for so long?

Adrian did not begin by imagining an entirely new city. Instead, he wondered whether the infrastructure already around him could simply work better. Rather than replacing every streetlight, could cities add technology to the ones already standing, allowing them to provide light only when and where it was actually needed?

In 2022, while still a student, Adrian entered the idea in Samsung Solve for Tomorrow under the team name Street Lightelligence. That year’s competition in Germany focused on urban environmental protection. Among more than 80 submissions, Street Lightelligence became one of the winning teams with its concept for equipping existing streetlights with self-developed onboard computers that could make them more intelligent and responsive.

At the time, there was no finished product and no company. There was simply a question about something everyone saw every day and an early idea for doing it differently.

An Idea Worth Pursuing

Solve for Tomorrow gave Adrian a place to test the idea. Through mentoring, coaching and ongoing feedback, the team refined the concept and explored its technical potential. What mattered was not only that the idea was recognized in the competition. It was also a chance to find out whether the problem they had identified was worth pursuing and whether their approach had room to grow.

“Solve for Tomorrow encouraged us to believe in our idea and to keep developing it. The guidance and feedback we received during the competition gave us valuable early validation for our approach to smarter street lighting.”

Adrian still remembers that early validation. And when the competition ended, the idea stayed with him. He continued sketching, prototyping and testing. There was plenty of improvisation along the way, but the central thought remained the same:

Making a city more sustainable does not always require rebuilding everything from scratch. Sometimes, what is already there can simply be made smarter. That idea eventually became ENVIOTECH, a startup based in Frankfurt am Main.

From One Streetlight to a Smarter City

ENVIOTECH begins with the infrastructure cities already have. Streetlights that remain fully illuminated throughout the night, even when streets are empty, can waste energy and contribute to light pollution. Rather than replacing entire lighting systems, ENVIOTECH adds intelligent technology to existing streetlights so they can be managed according to actual demand. For cities, the approach offers a way to make better use of infrastructure already in place while reducing the need for large-scale replacement projects.

But Adrian’s thinking did not stop with a single streetlight.

Streetlights already stand throughout cities. They are connected to power and positioned at useful heights in public spaces. That means they could potentially serve as a foundation for much more than lighting.

This is why ENVIOTECH is developing not only hardware, but also an open dashboard that enables cities to monitor and manage infrastructure more broadly. What began as an effort to make one streetlight smarter has grown into a larger idea: How can the infrastructure already around us become a more intelligent part of the city?

In May 2026, ENVIOTECH raised €1 million in pre-seed funding from a group of business angel investors. More important than the funding itself is what it represents. An idea once explored as a student project is now entering a stage where it must demonstrate its value in real-world settings with cities and infrastructure operators.

ENVIOTECH’s next step is to move from pilot projects to reference deployments and show how its technology can reduce energy use and costs while helping cities manage infrastructure more efficiently.

The Idea Is Still Growing

Four years after Adrian first asked his question, there is still no final answer. What began as curiosity about why streetlights always worked in the same way became an idea for making existing infrastructure smarter. That idea became a company preparing to test its technology in real cities. Now, Adrian’s focus is expanding beyond a single streetlight to the city around it.

Where ENVIOTECH will go next, which cities it will work with and how far the original idea will continue to grow remain open.

One thing, however, has already changed. Adrian no longer looks at existing infrastructure as something that simply has to remain the way it is. He sees what is already there, asks what else it could become and continues working toward his own answer.

Perhaps innovation does not always begin with a finished business plan. Sometimes, it begins when one person looks at something everyone else passes every day and asks:

“Why does it have to work this way?”

Samsung Solve for Tomorrow will continue to support more young people as they test their own questions, develop their ideas and discover for themselves where those questions might lead.