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 comes from Heidelberg. Helsing, which sells AI to Europe's militaries, was founded in Munich. Yet both companies have offices in Berlin. The city attracts too much talent to ignore. Universities like TU Berlin are producing 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 the population is under 45, something GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who grew up in Berlin, notes. “I founded my last startup in 2009 and I vividly remember how much energy, time and focus it required: having a large population of younger, diverse and international, and highly motivated professionals who have that energy and hunger, gives Berlin an advantage. he says. “Plus, Berlin has the best döner kebab.”
Blue layer
By 2050, the carbon credit market is expected to be a $250 billion industry. Startup BlueLayer is responding to that growth by developing tailor-made software for the companies and NGOs that will benefit from it. Its customers, including conservationists like Permian Global, carry out 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 lenders get their credits verified with international registers. Launched in 2022, BlueLayer has raised $10 million (€8.9 million) in investment and counts three of the top ten global lenders among its customers. “It is classic automation software,” says Vivian Bertseka, one of the three co-founders of BlueLayer, together with Alexander Argyros and Gerardo Bonilla, “but for a sector that used to work almost exclusively on Excel.” bluelayer.io
Cambrian
Cambrium, founded in 2020 by Mitchell Duffy and Charlie Cotton, uses AI to design proteins such as collagen. Instead of getting them from animal products, the startup grows them in tanks. “We are one of the companies trying to get into 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 investments to date, including from Google's AI venture fund Gradient Ventures. Skin care products using Cambrian's first protein, a collagen called NovaColl, are expected to hit shelves later this year. Cambrian.bio
Jina AI
In 2020, three veterans of Chinese tech giant Tencent joined forces to build basic models specifically for search. Drawn 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 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 intuitive Google-style searching. A legal firm may no longer need to search for documents based on a case number. Instead, Han Xiao, CEO and co-founder of Jina AI, explains that they can simply ask, “Find the case where Microsoft loses to Google.” After raising $39 million (€34.8 million) from a range of early-stage venture capital funds, including Canaan Partners, Xiao and his co-founders Nan Wang and Bing He plan to expand into the US. years, and increase the number of users. “We want to compete with OpenAI,” says Xiao. jina.ai
Endel
Endel is a paid app that uses generative AI to create one endless piece of music that continuously adapts to the user's environment. The app uses the phone's accelerometers to generate a rhythm that syncs with the listener's footsteps. If they start jogging or jumping, the pace will catch up. Endel calls itself a “sound wellness” startup and is part of the trend toward functional sound, where music has a purpose: helping people exercise, fall asleep or concentrate. “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. The company launched in 2018 and has since raised $22.1 million (19.1 million euros) in funding, including from Amazon's Alexa venture fund, and claims one million monthly active users. In 2023, the company signed a deal with Universal Music Group to use their technology to create new “soundscapes” using the work of established artists. endel.io
Kill
To understand Slay's success, credit must 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 as part game, part social platform, where friends or couples can raise a digital penguin together. The company, which has raised a total of $7.6 million (6.8 million euros), including from Accel, is currently scaling Pengu's ability to personalize its interactions, adding a series of LLMs to a 3D engine to create that visual experience. Pengu can respond when a child tells him he's being bullied by gifting him a drawing or sending personalized notifications to cheer him up. slay.cool
About Care
Ovom Care is a fertility startup that uses 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 – bypassing Germany's burdensome regulatory process – and claim to already be treating hundreds of people. In addition to the physical clinic, patient app and clinic management system, Ovom also offers machine learning algorithms that analyze patients' blood tests, wearable data, gamete analysis and ultrasound images to customize the type and timing of treatment. “We are now entering the era of precision medicine,” says CEO von Reden. “We are tailor-made [fertility] using technology”. That idea has attracted €4.8 million ($5.3 million) in seed funding led by Alpha Intelligence Capital. The company plans to attract medical tourists from across Europe to its second clinic in Portugal in the coming year, where treatment costs are expected to be cheaper. ovomcare.com
Dryad
When Carsten Brinkschulte's daughter started protesting climate change in 2018, the serial telecom entrepreneur started thinking about how he could use his experience for the good of the planet. The result was a startup called Dryad, launched in 2020, designed as an early wildfire detection network. “Consider us the Vodafone of the forest,” says Brinkschulte, one of the company's seven co-founders. Dryad's solar mesh networks allow sensors to send alerts when they detect fire, even in remote areas where there is no signal. To date, the company has sold 20,000 wildfire sensors and related hardware to 50 countries around the world, from Canada to Thailand, and to customers ranging from local governments to utilities looking to protect their infrastructure from an inferno. Dryad has raised €22 million ($24.6 million) to date, including from German deep-tech fund eCAPITAL. dryad.net
UltiHash
The rise of power-hungry AI prompted the International Energy Agency to warn that electricity consumption by data centers could double in just two years. As environmental groups debate the risk the technology poses to the climate, startup Ultihash has developed a practical way to reduce the data center needs of companies that perform energy-intensive machine learning or train their own models. Founded in 2022, Ultihash has developed an algorithm that CEO and co-founder Tom Lüdersdorf claims can reduce companies' data storage needs by up to 60 percent, meaning they need less data center space and can reduce their carbon footprint. The company has raised $2.5 million (2.2 million euros) despite still being in stealth mode. Lüdersdorf plans to launch the product later this year, after beta testing at more than 300 companies. ultihash.io
The Blood
According to TheBlood co-founders Isabelle Guenou and Miriam Santer, menstrual blood is an underappreciated asset for diagnostics because it contains data-rich endometrial tissue, living cells, immune cells and proteins that are not found in regular blood. The pair launched the company in 2022, with the aim of using menstrual blood in an effort to close the gender data gap in healthcare. Since then, the company has analyzed more than 1,000 menstrual blood samples and sold test kits for between €35 ($39) and €120 ($133) to women looking for more data to inform fertility or endometriosis treatment. TheBlood also plans to license biomarker analyzes or datasets to pharmaceutical companies. To date, the company has raised a total of €1 million ($1.1 million), including from healthcare-focused venture capital firm ROX Health. theblood.io
Qdrant
To create generative AI, algorithms must infer relationships between data (text, images, or audio) that are not labeled or organized. That's where so-called vector databases come into the picture, which help developers expand 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 low. Launched in 2021 by co-founders André Zayarni and Fabrizio Schmidt, Qdrant targets AI software developers and promises a vector search engine and database for unstructured data with an easy-to-use API. Over the past three years, the company has reached 7 million downloads and 10,000 users worldwide, raising $37 million (€33.2 million), including from US venture capital firm Spark Capital. qdrant.tech
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 edition of WIRED UK.
