Night skyline of Berlin

DACH · DE

Berlin

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Selected companies

Climate, quietly

Nearly twice the European rate on climate, which is not what Berlin is known for. Otherwise a generalist: no other category is more than a tenth above average.

  1. Bluerails logo

    Bluerails

    Agentic Commerce for Hospitality

    We make hospitality companies bookable by AI agents

    Bluerails makes hotel websites readable, bookable and payable by AI travel agents, so a booking lands directly with the hotel instead of defaulting to an online travel agency and its commission. It scores how visible a property already is to AI agents, then connects rates and availability so an agent can complete a real booking on the hotel's own site. Payment settles directly to the hotel, cutting out the usual intermediary entirely. Its founders are Jens Joseph Mannanal, who previously co-founded cross-border payments marketplace Passionfroot and worked in travel at GetYourGuide, and Ashwin Kumar, who built fintech products at Delivery Hero and Payrails before the two began working together.

    Founded 2026

  2. Compound Law logo

    Compound Law

    AI-Native Legal Services

    AI-native legal at the pace of your business

    Compound Law builds an AI-native law firm, aiming to answer client requests within an hour at a fixed price agreed upfront rather than billing by the hour. Every output is reviewed and signed off by a licensed General Counsel before it reaches a client, so artificial intelligence handles drafting and research while a human lawyer carries the judgement. The firm connects directly into the tools a legal team already uses, rather than adding a separate portal to check. Its founders are Marko Bradic and Mohit Tilwani, who previously built and sold a consumer crypto app together before working side by side at its acquirer, and Julian Jantze, a licensed lawyer who leads the firm's legal work as co-founder and chief legal officer.

    Founded 2026

  3. Construct Labs logo

    Construct Labs

    Custom Model Training & Serving

    The Custom Model Factory.

    Construct Labs trains and serves custom AI models for enterprises on open-source bases. The company trains directly inside the customer's existing agent harness and optimises on the customer's own data, so the model learns the exact tools, workflows and failure cases it will meet in production. The stack covers training, multi-tenant serving and continual learning from production feedback. Max Meuer and Julian Streibel founded the company after AI research roles at Aleph Alpha and Enam respectively.

    Founded 2026

  4. Distil Labs

    LLM Cost & Inference Optimization

    Replace LLMs with custom SLMs. Today.

    Distil labs replaces costly frontier-model calls with small, task-specific models that match the same accuracy at a fraction of the cost and latency. It captures a slice of a customer's live traffic, builds synthetic training data from it without manual labelling, fine-tunes and deploys an optimised endpoint, then keeps retraining as the workload changes. Jacek Golebiowski founded the company after leading language-model teams at Amazon and a PhD at Imperial College London, together with Selim Nowicki.

    Founded 2024

  5. GeneralMind logo

    GeneralMind

    ERP Workflow Automation

    Put your supply chain on autopilot.

    GeneralMind automates recurring supply chain workflows end to end, running as an AI layer on top of existing ERP systems and covering both procure-to-pay and order-to-cash: purchase orders, invoices, delivery confirmations and collections. It captures unstructured communication across email, PDF and EDI, matches it against ERP master data, and routes high confidence transactions through automatically while flagging exceptions for review. Tushar Ahluwalia, Dr. Oliver Dlugosch and Shrestha Chowdhury founded the company together with Lennart von Hardenberg, Nishrit Shrivastva and Sergiu Șoima. The first three previously built Razor Group into a global ecommerce aggregator.

    Founded 2025

  6. INXM logo

    INXM

    Enterprise Process Orchestration

    Compiled AI finishes the work reliably.

    INXM builds an AI process execution engine for enterprises. Rather than letting an agent reinterpret every transaction at runtime, the system compiles a stated intent into a typed, validated plan, then executes it deterministically and repeatably, with a full audit trail. Alexander Oelling, Matthias Kainer, Kamil Klüber and Jesper Bylund founded the company coming out of digital and software leadership roles at Volocopter and Isar Aerospace.

    Founded 2025

  7. Kyrok logo

    Kyrok

    Pharma & Chemicals Supply Chain

    The AI supply chain operating system for Europe's pharma and chemicals.

    Kyrok builds an AI operating system for supply chain teams in pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing, layering over existing ERP systems rather than replacing them. Its agents take on customer service, production planning, material planning and procurement, capturing the process knowledge of a retiring generation of operators, while people keep the final approval. Daniel Hofinger and Lukas Bierfreund founded the company after conducting more than 200 interviews with supply chain operators before writing any code.

    Founded 2025

  8. Opencompany logo

    Opencompany

    Agent-Native Workspace

    The open source AI workspace.

    Opencompany is a shared AI workspace where a team and its agents work side by side. It builds a living company wiki from connected sources such as Slack, GitHub, Linear and Gmail, then runs agentic workflows, on any model and any coding agent, inside cloud sandboxes. Louis Morgner founded the company, having previously co-founded Jamie, an AI meeting assistant.

    Founded 2026

  9. Qontext logo

    Qontext

    Company Context Infrastructure

    Building the context layer for the AI-native company.

    Qontext builds a shared context repository that gives every AI agent in a company structured, permission-aware access to what the business knows: its products, customers, processes and past decisions. It connects to the tools a team already uses and keeps that knowledge current as those systems change, exposing it to chat tools and agents through an API, CLI or MCP. Every change is logged, and access can be restricted by user or by tool. Lorenz Hieber and Nikita Kowalski founded the company together, having first built projects together as teenagers.

    Founded 2025

  10. Scipio logo

    Scipio

    Defence Logistics & Command Systems

    Enabling resilient supply chains.

    Scipio builds software for resilient military supply chains, cutting resupply planning from days to minutes and giving commanders full asset visibility even in comms denied environments. Its Appia platform integrates with existing command and control systems, including a recent partnership with Thales' HexaForce system. Philipp Enzinger and Tim Birkhofer founded the company, coming out of investing at Project A and a prior logistics startup (SID. ai, YC S23), respectively.

    Founded 2025

As early-stage VCs, most companies we look at are early, some pre-inception. To properly capture the formation layer, we looked back no more than 18 months from a company's founding, and no more than one institutional round raised.

We believe getting to the core truth of a company radiates from the founding team, and that those signs show up long before a company has its breakout success. So we got on the ground, city by city, talking directly to the ecosystem leaders, university professors, angels, operators and micro VCs who see these companies before anyone else does. The names that kept coming up independently, before they showed up anywhere public, were what we went after.

Every one of those names, alongside thousands of other companies we track a year, went through the same internal scoring model: the scale of impact the company could have globally, how genuinely AI-native the product is, the strength of the thesis, and the team, their talent density, where they've built before, how deep that experience really runs. We ended up with ten companies per city that we believe combine all of the above, while capturing the city's own heartbeat and the themes defining it.

Formations counted

454

Fewer formationsMore formations

Every city in the sample on a log scale, 10 to 1,876 formations. Berlin is marked in pink. London sits at the far right as a volume outlier (1,876).

Rank by formation volume
3 of 89
SHARE OF SAMPLE EUROPEAN FORMATION
8.4%
# FORMATIONS VERSUS THE AVERAGE CITY
7.37x

Category mix

What Berlin is made of

The categories these 457 companies fall into. AI-first software is the largest.

  • AI-first software24%
  • Conventional SaaS20%
  • Fintech11%
  • Consumer11%
  • Health10%

Specialisation

What Berlin builds

On raw volume most European cities look alike. Character only appears once each theme is compared with a typical European city. Every company now carries a category and sub-theme. Pink marks the categories where Berlin differs most; provisional comparisons rest on fewer than 10 companies and are never the lead claim.

Above the line means this city forms more of something than a typical European city does. Below means less.

  • Centre line: a typical European city (1.0)
  • Forms more than average
  • Forms less than average
  • Provisional: fewer than 10 companies
  • Values read as 1.93x the average, then the theme's share of the city's companies

Typical European city (1.0)

  • Climate1.90x the average  · 5.7% of the city+ 3 sub-themes
    • Carbon & environmental MRV38.5%
    • Energy generation & transition26.9%
    • Grid, storage & power electronics19.2%
  • Health1.10x the average  · 9.8% of the city+ 3 sub-themes
    • Clinics, practices & patient care71.1%
    • Biotech tools & lab automation13.3%
    • Drug discovery & therapeutics6.7%
  • AI-first software1.09x the average  · 24.1% of the city+ 3 sub-themes
    • AI tools for everyday work48.2%
    • Marketing, ads & content11.8%
    • Data & analytics9.1%