From renewable energy to data management, Berlin boasts an impressive tech start-up ecosystem and any of these five could be the city’s next success story.
Germany has been a powerful tech player in Europe for many years. As Europe’s largest market, the country has strong tech talent and research institutions to back it up.
In 2024 alone, the country saw several massive investments from major tech players. In January 2024, Nokia announced plans to invest €360m in software, hardware and chip design in multiple sites in Germany. A month later, Microsoft said it was investing €3.2bn in the country to double its cloud and AI infrastructure.
And in June later that year, Amazon Web Services revealed plans to invest €8.8bn into its existing cloud infrastructure in the country, while Nexperia, a chipmaker headquartered in the Netherlands, will invest $200m in Germany to establish a site in Hamburg.
The start-up scene in Germany is strong too, with more than €9.5bn raised by tech companies in 2024 according to Tech.EU. As the country’s capital, Berlin plays a particularly strong role making up a fifth of the country’s total start-ups in 2023.
According to Matias Collan, CEO and managing director of ACE Alternatives, Berlin has carved itself into a “formidable tech hub” with more than 4,800 start-ups operating in the city.
Berlin is also home to challenger bank and Revolut rival N26, fashion-tech company Zalando and food delivery company Delivery Hero.
So, which start-up is next to make it big from German’s capital city? We picked out just five from different industries that show some promise.
Cloover
Founded by Jodok Betschart, Peder Broms and Valentin Gönczy, Cloover is a renewable energy start-up acts as a connector to all key stakeholders in the energy chain, from installers and manufacturers to providers and investors.
In 2023, the company raised €7m in pre-seed funding and last May, it secured another €105m to fuel growth of its system.
HiPeople
HR tech start-up HiPeople was founded in 2019 by Jakob Gillmann and Sebastian Schüller and seeks to help recruiters to hire remotely using automated reference checks.
The company raised €1.1m in pre-seed funding ahead of its product launch in 2020 and then secured a further $3m in 2021 to further develop its recruitment tool.
Key Ward
Key Ward is a data management start-up that emerged from stealth mode late last year with a pre-seed funding round of €1m.
Founded by Asparuh Stoyanov, Hoss Habib and Maxime Bunel, Key Ward offers a no-code SaaS platform to help engineering teams manage complex data and create custom AI models to predict design performance. The company counts AWS, Nvidia and German’s federal ministry for economic affairs and climate protection among its customers.
Mondu
Fintech start-up Mondu is capitalising on the buy now, pay later market with its B2B payment products to bring them in line with B2C offerings on the market.
Having been founded by Malte Huffmann, Philipp Povel and Gil Danziger in 2021, the company has grown fast. Having raised $14m in that first year, it went on to secure more than $100m in the years that followed and established offices in three markets.
NextWind
Founded in 2020 following a $100m investment, renewable energy start-up NextWind is managed by co-founders Lars B Meyer, Werner Süss and Ewald Woste.
The company focuses on optimising existing windfarms, replacing outdated turbines with more efficient ones. In 2023, NextWind raised $750m in funding to expand and at the beginning of 2025, it acquired 12 additional windfarms in Germany.
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