Munich

Discovering materials that unlock technological progress

alqem combines AI with materials science to accelerate discovery, pairing a proprietary database of predicted crystalline materials with in-house synthesis to validate what the models predict. First target is rare-earth-free permanent magnets, a materials class with no major breakthrough in over 40 years. Hanh Nguyen, a former McKinsey Associate Partner with 15 years in chemicals and energy, co-founded the company with Tiago Cerqueira, who helped build the Alexandria materials database, and Milan Allan, who holds an LMU physics chair.

Founded 2026

Protecting the ultimate high ground

Arqus builds autonomous directed-energy defence systems, patented lasers and electronic-warfare modules that neutralise unmanned threats without physical destruction, protecting critical infrastructure, mobile platforms and space assets. Marnix Meersman, a former ESA engineer, founded the company with Stijn Lafontaine, a robotics engineer who previously built autonomy systems for uncrewed vessels at Fugro, and Anton Liegert.

Founded 2026

The AI Foundation for Legal and Compliance

Bayshore AI builds a legal and compliance “frontdoor” that turns regulation into machine-executable logic, running requests from intake through to decision with a full audit trail. Paul F. Welter, an admitted German lawyer who led Compound AI work at Stanford CodeX, founded the company with Philipp Wiegand and Erik Krauter, whose research background is in manipulation-policy reinforcement learning at ETH.

Founded 2025

Modernize your mainframe, on your terms.

Element modernises mainframe systems for enterprise clients, replacing big bang COBOL rewrites with an incremental, auditable process. Its Global Context Engine maps a codebase's system infrastructure, data flows and business logic before any code changes, so modernisation happens module by module rather than all at once. Alexander Wiener, Lukas Marienfeld and Julian Zeller founded the company with backgrounds spanning TU Munich, a prior startup exit and BCG's banking practice. The team operates out of Munich.

Founded 2025

Every matter, its own AI

Grubel automates the specialization loop that usually takes AI teams weeks of manual work, so a specialised AI can be built per legal matter through test-time data curation, adaptation and continual evaluation. Moritz Hardt, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, founded the lab with Reinhard Heckel, a TUM professor who publishes on inference-time scaling.

Founded 2026

Give your team their best week, every week

Trymarble, built by Marble Cognition, studies a team's actual repeatable work and builds AI coworkers, with native computer and browser use, that the team can delegate specific tasks to. Felix Rösner, previously at 11x, founded the company with Christophe Schmit, previously at Enam; the two met through Munich's CDTM program.

Founded not yet measured

We deploy embodied intelligence into the operations that run the physical world, then turn what it learns there into research that compounds.

microagi deploys robots into live factory operations, using its Atlas platform to record how experienced workers do a task, multiply that footage in simulation, and fine-tune a model until the robot can do the job reliably on its own. A separate consumer arm, shift, records everyday chores such as home cleaning in exchange for the service itself, turning ordinary tasks into the same kind of training data. The company was founded by Bercan Kilic, previously an aerodynamics engineer at Red Bull Racing, together with a founding team around him.

Founded 2025

Industrial robots that work like your expert colleagues

Mkind builds intelligent robots for high-mix manufacturing that scan a new, unknown part and generate an expert trajectory on their own, improving from human corrections over time. Michael Sauer, previously co-founder of Munich tech studio Motius, founded the company with Christoph Willibald and Gabriele Tiboni, whose TUM and DLR robotics research the platform is built on, and Paul Kröger, an ETH and Columbia-trained engineer.

Founded 2026

We are obsessed with breaking and improving robot policies

Poke & Wiggle runs the largest independent Franka FR3 Duo robot-arm farm, used to stress-test frontier world models and robot policies until they break, then closes the loop with the data and benchmarks that fix them. José Ramón Medina Hernández and Nicolas Keller founded the company. Robot operations are based at Munich's Deutsches Museum.

Founded 2025

The future of office work.

Pretty works with the most ambitious firms in finance and consulting to build client documents in a fraction of the time with AI. Any document, anywhere you are. Felix Wu, Valentin Paul Ostarek and Emil Scheffer founded the company together.