German innovation is not limited to the country’s capital. In fact, some of this year’s most prolific startups are based hundreds of miles away. The AI startup Alpha Alpha hails from Heidelberg. Helsing, which sells AI to Europe’s militaries, was set up in Munich. Yet both companies operate Berlin offices. The city attracts too much talent to ignore. Universities, such as TU Berlin, churn out Generative AI founders and the capital is such a magnet for international talent that many offices operate in English, not German.
It’s also a very young city—half of its population is under 45, something that Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, who grew up in Berlin, remarks on. “I founded my last startup back in 2009 and I remember vividly how much energy, time, and focus it required—having a large population of younger, diverse and international, and highly motivated professionals that have that energy and hunger gives Berlin an edge,” he says. “Plus, Berlin has the best döner kebab.”
BlueLayer
By 2050, the carbon credit market is expected to be a $250 billion industry. Startup BlueLayer is catering to that growth by developing tailor-made software for the companies and NGOs poised to benefit. Its clients—including conservationists such as Permian Global—run projects ranging from reforestation to direct air capture, and use the startup’s software to process their data, and communicate with buyers and investors, while helping credit providers get their credits verified with international registries. Launched in 2022, BlueLayer has raised $10 million (€8.9 million) in investment and counts three of the top 10 issuers of credits globally among its clients. “It’s classic automation software,” says Vivian Bertseka, one of BlueLayer’s three co-founders along with Alexander Argyros and Gerardo Bonilla, “but for an industry that used to operate almost exclusively on Excel.” bluelayer.io
Cambrium
Cambrium, founded in 2020 by Mitchell Duffy and Charlie Cotton, is using AI to design proteins such as collagen. Instead of sourcing them from animal products, the startup grows them in tanks. “We’re one of the companies trying to straddle hardcore software engineering [and AI] with putting physical stuff in the real world,” says Cotton. The company has received $11.6 million (€10.3 million) in investment so far, including from Google’s AI venture fund Gradient Ventures. Skincare products using Cambrium’s first protein, a collagen called NovaColl, are expected to hit shelves later this year. Cambrium.bio
Jina AI
In 2020, three veterans of Chinese tech behemoth, Tencent, joined forces to build foundation models specifically for search. Attracted to Berlin by the city’s open source culture and software engineering talents, the trio behind Jina now claim 9,000 users and 400 paying customers, who turn to the company when they want to build either a public or internal search system for their data. Jina’s models promise to convert PDFs, Word documents or images into a language that AI models can understand well enough to enable an intuitive Google-style search. A legal company may no longer have to search for documents using a case number. Instead, Jina AI CEO and co-founder Han Xiao explains that they could simply ask: “Find the case where Microsoft loses to Google”. After raising $39 million (€34.8 million) from a series of early stage VC funds including Canaan Partners, Xiao and his co-founders Nan Wang and Bing He plan to expand to the US, raise revenue from the company’s $500,000 (€447,000) per year, and boost user numbers. “We want to compete with OpenAI,” says Xiao. jina.ai
Endel
Endel is a paid-for app that uses generative AI to create one endless piece of music, which constantly adapts to its user’s surroundings. The app utilizes the phone accelerometers to generate a beat that syncs with its listeners’ footsteps. If they start jogging or skipping, the tempo catches up. Calling itself a “sound wellness” startup, Endel is part of the trend for functional sound, where music has a purpose—to help people exercise, fall asleep or focus. “We want to create a technology that harnesses the power of sound and helps you achieve a certain cognitive state,” says CEO Oleg Stavitsky, one of Endel’s six co-founders. Launched in 2018, the company has since raised $22.1 million (€19.1 million) in funding, including from Amazon’s Alexa venture fund, and claims one million monthly active users. In 2023, the company struck a deal with Universal Music Group to use their technology to create new “soundscapes” using established artists’ work. endel.io
Slay
To understand Slay’s success, credit has to be given to Pengu, the company’s virtual pet app that has become the startup’s most popular product with more than five million users. Founded by Fabian Kamberi, Jannis Ringwald, and Stefan Quernhorst, Slay created Pengu to be part game, part social platform, where friends or couples can collaboratively raise a digital penguin. The company, which has raised $7.6 million (€6.8 million) in total, including from Accel, is currently scaling Pengu’s ability to personalize its interactions, hooking a series of LLMs to a 3D engine to create that visual experience. Pengu might respond to a child telling them they are being bullied by gifting them a drawing or sending personalized notifications to cheer them up. slay.cool
Ovom Care
Ovom Care is a fertility startup using data and machine learning to take the guesswork out of reproductive medicine. Since launching in 2023, co-founders Felicia von Reden, Cristina Hickman, and Lynae Brayboy have opened the company’s first fertility clinic in London—sidestepping the onerous regulatory process in Germany—and already claim to be treating hundreds of people. Alongside the physical clinic, patient app and clinic management system, Ovom also offers machine-learning algorithms that analyze patients’ blood tests, data from wearables, gamete analysis and ultrasound images to tailor the type and timing of treatment. “We’re now going into the era of precision medicine,” says CEO von Reden. “We’re tailoring [fertility] using technology”. That idea has attracted €4.8 million ($5.3 million) in seed funding led by Alpha Intelligence Capital. Within the next year, the company plans to attract medical tourists from all across Europe to its second clinic in Portugal, where treatment costs are expected to be cheaper. ovomcare.com
Felicia von Reden, founder and CEO of Ovom Care.
Dryad
When Carsten Brinkschulte’s daughter started protesting against climate change in 2018, the serial telecoms entrepreneur started to think about how he could leverage his experience for the good of the planet. The result was a startup called Dryad, launched in 2020, designed to be an early wildfire detection network. “Think of us like the Vodafone of the forest,” says Brinkschulte, one of the company’s seven co-founders. Dryad’s solar-powered mesh networks enable sensors to send alerts when they detect fire, even in remote areas where there is no signal. So far the company has sold 20,000 wildfire sensors and related hardware to 50 countries across the world, from Canada to Thailand, and to clients ranging from local governments to utility companies that want to protect their infrastructure from an inferno. Dryad has raised €22 million ($24.6 million) so far, including from German deep tech fund eCAPITAL. dryad.net
UltiHash
The rise of energy-hungry AI prompted the International Energy Agency to warn that the electricity consumed by data centers could double in just two years. As environmental groups discuss the risk that the technology poses to the climate, startup Ultihash has been developing a practical way to slash the data center needs of companies performing energy-intensive machine learning or training their own models. Founded in 2022, Ultihash has developed an algorithm that CEO and co-founder Tom Lüdersdorf claims can slash companies’ data storage needs by up to 60 per cent, meaning they need less data center space and reduce their carbon footprint. The company has raised $2.5 million (€2.2 million) despite still being in stealth mode. Lüdersdorf plans to launch the product later this year, after beta testing with more than 300 companies. ultihash.io
TheBlood
According to TheBlood’s co-founders, Isabelle Guenou and Miriam Santer, menstrual blood is an under-appreciated asset for diagnostics, containing data-rich endometrial tissue, live cells, immune cells and proteins, which are not found in ordinary blood. The pair launched the company in 2022, with the aim to use menstrual blood in an attempt to fill healthcare’s gender data gap. Since then, the firm has analyzed more than 1,000 menstrual blood samples, selling testing kits for between €35 ($39) and €120 ($133) to women who are looking for more data to inform fertility or endometriosis treatment. TheBlood also plans to license biomarker analysis or data sets to pharmaceutical companies. So far, the company has raised €1 million ($1.1million) in total, including from healthcare-focused venture firm ROX Health. theblood.io
Qdrant
To create generative AI, algorithms have to infer relationships between data—text, images or audio—that isn’t labeled or organized. That’s where so-called vector databases come in, helping developers extend the long-term memory of LLMs by making it easier for those models to search and analyze large amounts of data, while keeping computational costs down. Launched in 2021 by co-founders André Zayarni and Fabrizio Schmidt, Qdrant is catering to AI software developers, promising a vector search engine and database for unstructured data with an easy-to-use API. In the past three years, the company has reached 7 million downloads and 10,000 users worldwide, raising $37 million (€33.2 million) in the process including from US venture capital firm Spark Capital. qdrant.tech
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 edition of WIRED UK.
