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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. AI startup Alpha Alpha hails from Heidelberg. Helsing, which sells AI to European armies, was created in Munich. However, both companies have offices in Berlin. The city attracts too much talent to ignore. Universities such as TU Berlin, produce Generative AI founders and the capital are such a magnet for international talent that many offices operate in English, not German.
It is also a very young city: half of its population is under 45 years old, something said by Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, who grew up in Berlin. “I founded my last startup in 2009 and I vividly remember how much energy, time and focus it required – having a large population of young, diverse, international and highly motivated professionals who have that energy and hunger gives Berlin an advantage. “, says. “Plus, Berlin has the best döner kebab.”
blue cape
By 2050, the carbon credit market is expected to be a $250 billion industry. Startup BlueLayer is addressing that growth by developing tailored software for companies and NGOs that are poised to benefit. Its clients, including conservationists like 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 verify their credits in international registries. Launched in 2022, BlueLayer has raised $10 million (€8.9 million) in investments and counts three of the top 10 global credit issuers 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 in Excel.” azullayer.io
cambrium
Cambrium, founded in 2020 by Mitchell Duffy and Charlie Cotton, uses artificial intelligence to engineer proteins like collagen. Instead of sourcing them from animal products, the startup grows them in tanks. “We’re one of the companies trying to combine software engineering (and artificial intelligence) with putting physical things in the real world,” Cotton says. The company has so far received $11.6 million (€10.3 million) in investments, including from Google’s AI venture fund, Gradient Ventures. Skin care products using Cambrium’s first protein, a collagen called NovaColl, are expected to hit stores later this year. Cambrium.bio
Jina AI
In 2020, three veterans of Chinese tech giant Tencent joined forces to create basic models specific to search. Drawn to Berlin by the city’s open source culture and software engineering talent, the trio behind Jina now has 9,000 users and 400 paying customers, who turn to the company when they want to build a public search system or internal for your data. Jina’s models promise to convert PDF files, Word documents or images into a language that AI models can understand well enough to enable intuitive Google-style search. A legal firm may no longer have to search for documents using a case number. Instead, Han Xiao, CEO and co-founder of Jina AI, explains that they could simply ask, “Find the case where Microsoft loses to Google.” After raising $39 million (€34.8 million) from a number of early-stage venture capital funds, including Canaan Partners, Xiao and his co-founders Nan Wang and Bing He plan to expand to the US, raise income of 500,000 dollars (447,000 euros) per year of the company. year 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 an endless piece of music, constantly adapting to the user’s environment. The app uses the phone’s accelerometers to generate a rhythm that syncs with its listeners’ steps. If they start jogging or jumping, the pace catches up. Endel, which calls itself a “sound wellness” startup, is part of the functional sound trend, where music has a purpose: to help 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. Launched in 2018, the company has since raised $22.1 million (€19.1 million) in funding, including from Amazon’s Alexa venture fund, and has one million monthly active users. In 2023, the company reached an agreement with Universal Music Group to use its technology to create new “soundscapes” using the work of established artists. endel.io
Kill
To understand Slay’s success, you have to give credit 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 and 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 Accel, is currently expanding Pengu’s ability to personalize its interactions, connecting a series of LLMs to a 3D engine to create that visual experience. Pengu could respond to a child who tells him he is being bullied by giving him a drawing or sending him personalized notifications to cheer him up. kill.cool
Egg 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 opened the company’s first fertility clinic in London, avoiding the onerous regulatory process in Germany, and already claim to 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, data from wearable devices, gamete analysis and ultrasound images to adapt the type and the time of treatment. “We are entering the era of precision medicine,” says CEO von Reden. “We are adapting (fertility) using technology.” That idea has attracted €4.8 million ($5.3 million) in seed funding led by Alpha Intelligence Capital. Over the next year, the company plans to attract medical tourists from across Europe to its second clinic in Portugal, where treatment costs are expected to be cheaper. ovomcare.com
Dryad
When Carsten Brinkschulte’s daughter began protesting climate change in 2018, the serial telecommunications entrepreneur began thinking 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 a wildfire early detection network. “Think of us as the Vodafone of the forest,” says Brinkschulte, one of the company’s seven co-founders. Dryad’s solar-powered mesh networks allow sensors to send alerts when they detect a 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 around the world, from Canada to Thailand, and to customers ranging from local governments to utilities 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-intensive AI led the International Energy Agency to warn that the electricity consumed by data centers could double in just two years. As environmental groups discuss Faced with the risk that technology poses to the climate, startup Ultihash has been developing a practical way to reduce the data center needs of companies that do energy-intensive machine learning or train their own models. Founded in 2022, Ultihash has developed an algorithm that CEO and co-founder Tom Lüdersdorf says can reduce businesses’ data storage needs by up to 60 percent, meaning they need less data center space. and reduce their carbon footprint. The company has raised 2.5 million dollars (2.2 million euros) despite remaining in stealth mode. Lüdersdorf plans to launch the product later this year, after beta testing with more than 300 companies. ultihash.io
the blood
According to TheBlood co-founders Isabelle Guenou and Miriam Santer, menstrual blood is an underappreciated diagnostic asset as it contains endometrial tissue, live cells, immune cells and data-rich proteins, which are not found in normal blood. The couple launched the company in 2022, with the goal of using menstrual blood in a bid to fill 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 euros ($39) and 120 euros ($133) to women seeking 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 ($1.1 million) in total, including from healthcare-focused venture firm ROX Health. blood.io
Qdrant
To create generative AI, algorithms have to infer relationships between data (text, images or audio) that is not labeled or organized. That’s where so-called vector databases come in, helping 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 down. Launched in 2021 by co-founders André Zayarni and Fabrizio Schmidt, Qdrant is aimed at 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) in the process, including from American venture capital firm Spark Capital. qdrant.tech
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of WIRED UK.