Startuprad.io's Entity Intelligence
9am.works
Company
9am.works, run by Berlin-based 9am GmbH, is a freelancer platform positioning itself as an operating system for independent work: an AI profile, a freelancer CRM, a job aggregator and an academy, plus company-side tools for contracting and centrally paying freelancers. Founded 2021 by Marc Clemens.
AQON PURE
Company
AQON PURE is a German cleantech company making salt-free water softening systems for homes, aiming to prevent limescale without the chloride discharge of traditional salt-based softeners. Grown out of a family water-treatment business, it scaled bootstrapped via a direct-to-consumer and certified-installer model into Spain and Poland, earning FT1000 and Top-100 innovative-SME recognition.
AT Impf 100 Beteiligungs GmbH
Foundation
Strüngmann family-office special-purpose investment holding vehicle used to hold the founding stake in BioNTech SE; deployed the approximately 150 million euro 2008 seed capital that Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann provided to BioNTech and remained the single largest external BioNTech shareholder through the 2019 NASDAQ IPO and the 2021 market-capitalisation peak.
AUTO1 Group
Company
AUTO1 Group SE is a Berlin-headquartered digital automotive platform founded in 2012 by Christian Bertermann and Hakan Koç that buys, sells and finances used cars across Europe through the brands wirkaufendeinauto.de, AUTO1.com and Autohero. The company has been listed in the Prime Standard segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 4 February 2021 and is a member of the MDAX mid-cap index. It reported revenue of EUR 8.2 billion and 842,000 cars sold in 2025.
Agile Robots
Company
Munich-headquartered robotics company founded in 2018 by Peter Meusel and Zhaopeng Chen out of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), combining force-torque-sensitive robot arms with computer vision. Became Germany's first robotics unicorn via a USD 220 million SoftBank-led Series C in 2021 and has since expanded by acquisition.
Aleph Alpha GmbH
Company
Aleph Alpha GmbH is a Heidelberg-headquartered artificial-intelligence company founded in 2019 by Jonas Andrulis and Samuel Weinbach that, after exiting frontier foundation-model competition in 2024, builds PhariaAI, a sovereign enterprise AI operating system for European enterprises and public institutions.
AlphaQ
Company
Berlin-headquartered German venture-capital fund-of-funds manager, founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Stephan Heller with co-founding partners Oliver Oster, Marius Weber and Marcus Boerner, that positions itself as a founder-driven VC-for-VCs vehicle. AlphaQ commits primary capital to a diversified portfolio of early-stage venture-capital funds mainly in Europe (with selective exposure to Israel and the United States), targets a total assets ambition of EUR 1 billion (initial target volume EUR 500 million) and has publicly reported allocations to funds including Northzone, Partech, Speedinvest, Headline, Nucleus Capital and White Star Capital, among others.
Amazing Blocks
Company
Amazing Blocks is a blockchain company, reported as based in Liechtenstein, that legally tokenizes assets — equity, debt, patents and trademarks — via Liechtenstein SPVs under the country's Token Act. Founded in August 2020, it was profiled by Startuprad.io alongside the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center's Crypto Assets Conference.
Andreas Bodczek
Person
German tech executive and entrepreneur who has served as Chief Executive Officer of Munich-headquartered identity-verification platform IDnow GmbH since 2018, holds an MBA from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen, and was previously CEO of Fyber N.V. and CEO of Telefonica Deutschland's fixed-net business. Publicly reported early-stage investor and board partner at Point Nine Capital.
AskBrian
Company
Munich-based German artificial-intelligence startup founded in 2018 by Pavol Sikula (Chief Executive Officer) and Matthias Ruppel (Chief Technology Officer) that built a text-based digital assistant for consultants, executives and business-services professionals, delivering research, translation, data analysis and presentation tasks over email and Microsoft Teams from a GDPR-compliant Germany-hosted platform. Acquired by Berlin-based PowerPoint-productivity vendor think-cell in September 2023; prior investors publicly reported include Fostec Ventures (pre-seed lead), and angels including the founders of Zenloop, Flaconi, Flink and Kartenmacherei.
Atomico
Company
London-headquartered European venture-capital firm founded in 2006 by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, investing at Series A through pre-IPO in European technology companies. Publisher of the annual State of European Tech report and, in September 2024, closed its largest ever fundraise of USD 1.24 billion across Atomico Venture VI (USD 485 million) and Atomico Growth VI (USD 754 million). Notable portfolio companies include Klarna, Supercell, Stripe, Pipedrive, DeepL and Aiven.
BISON
Company
Stuttgart-headquartered German mobile trading application for cryptocurrencies and digital assets, launched in January 2019 by the Boerse Stuttgart Group as one of the first regulated retail crypto-trading products operated by an established European stock exchange. Operated inside the Boerse Stuttgart Digital / EUWAX AG stack with custody by Blocknox GmbH; supervised under German BaFin frameworks and subject to the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.
Bain Capital
Organization
Bain Capital is a US alternative asset management firm founded in 1984 as a spin-off from the consulting firm Bain & Company, headquartered in Boston, that invests across private equity, credit, public equity, venture capital, real estate, life sciences and other alternative strategies.
Berlin Brands Group
Holding
Berlin Brands Group is a Berlin direct-to-consumer e-commerce holding founded in 2005 as Chal-Tec by Peter Chaljawski, known for Klarstein, auna and blumfeldt. It became a unicorn in 2021, and HPS Investment Partners took sole control in a change of control cleared in March 2024.
Billie
Company
Billie is a Berlin-based B2B fintech providing embedded buy-now-pay-later and invoice-financing infrastructure for online marketplaces and business merchants across Europe. Founded in 2016, it has raised over US$100 million from investors including Dawn Capital and, per later reports, Klarna.
Binance
Company
Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by spot trading volume, founded in July 2017 by Changpeng Zhao (CZ) and Yi He. As of 2025 it reports more than 300 million registered users and roughly 38 percent of global spot market share (both company-reported). CZ stepped down as CEO in November 2023 as part of a US settlement. In the DACH region Binance never held a full BaFin licence: it withdrew its 2023 BaFin application and, per Startuprad.io reporting on June 2026 news, subsequently exited spot trading across the European Economic Area under MiCA enforcement.
Bitpanda
Company
Bitpanda GmbH is a Vienna-headquartered Austrian retail investment platform founded in 2014 by Eric Demuth, Paul Klanschek and Christian Trummer that gives European retail customers app-based access to cryptocurrencies, fractional shares, exchange-traded funds and precious metals. It supplies the same regulated trading, custody and settlement infrastructure to banks and financial institutions through Bitpanda Technology Solutions. In March 2021 Bitpanda became the first Austrian company to be valued above one billion US dollars, and in January 2025 it became the first large European crypto platform to hold a licence under the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation.
Black Forest Labs
Company
Black Forest Labs is a German generative-artificial-intelligence company founded in 2024 by former members of the Stability AI research team, including Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Dominik Lorenz, that develops the FLUX family of text-to-image models and the Kontext image-editing model.
BlackRock
Organization
BlackRock is a US asset management firm founded in 1988, headquartered in New York, that is the largest asset manager in the world by assets under management and provides investment management, risk management and financial advisory services to institutional and retail clients globally.
Bloomberg L.P.
Media
Privately held US financial technology, data, media and information services company headquartered in New York City, founded in 1981 by Michael Bloomberg (with co-founders Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan and Charles Zegar); operator of the Bloomberg Terminal, the wire and multimedia news service Bloomberg News, and the Bloomberg Businessweek publication; distinct as a corporate entity from Michael Bloomberg the individual.
Brant Cooper
Person
United States-based (San Diego, California) New York Times bestselling business-book author, keynote speaker and startup and enterprise-innovation advisor, best known as the co-author of the Lean Entrepreneur (with Patrick Vlaskovits, 2013) and the author of Disruption Proof. Brant Cooper is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Moves the Needle, a firm that applies lean, human-centred design and agile methodologies to help large enterprises adopt startup-style innovation practices. He is publicly recognised as one of the originators of the Lean Startup movement.
Bundesanstalt fuer Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht
Organization
BaFin (Bundesanstalt fuer Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht) is the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, established on 1 May 2002 with headquarters in Bonn and a second office in Frankfurt am Main, and is the integrated national supervisor for banking, insurance, securities and asset management in Germany.
CYNORA
Company
CYNORA was a German deep-tech OLED emitter developer headquartered in Bruchsal near Karlsruhe. A spinoff associated with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), it developed thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) OLED emitter materials — notably cyBlueBooster and cyUltimateGreen — targeting more efficient blue and green OLED displays. Samsung Display acquired CYNORA's intellectual property in a transaction announced in June 2022 for a reported ~USD 300 million; the company's roughly 120 employees were terminated at the transaction.
Cansativa
Company
Cansativa is a medical-cannabis wholesaler, importer and distributor based in Moerfelden-Walldorf near Frankfurt Airport, founded in 2017 by Benedikt and Jakob Sons. It supplies German pharmacies and holds the distribution mandate for the BfArM cannabis agency's domestically grown cannabis.
Casablanca AI
Company
Casablanca.ai is a Pforzheim deep-tech company whose AI software restores natural eye contact in video calls without extra hardware, founded in 2020 by Carsten Kraus with Markus Vollmer and Ivan Alles. Casablanca.AI GmbH filed for insolvency at Amtsgericht Pforzheim in October 2025.
Christian Conrad
Person
Germany-based leadership and organisational-culture author, coach and keynote speaker, founder of the Management Boost advisory practice and author of the book Magnetische Unternehmenskultur (Magnetic Company Culture). Christian Conrad's public work focuses on how small and medium enterprises and scaling startups can measurably improve engagement and retention through a repeatable culture-execution framework built on employee Net Promoter Score movement, the Four Disciplines of Execution and a visible cultural-KPI scoreboard. He brings prior executive experience from consumer-goods multinationals including Unilever and Kellogg's.
Clark
Company
CLARK Germany GmbH is a Frankfurt am Main-headquartered German insurtech company founded in 2015 that operates a digital insurance manager and licensed insurance brokerage. Through the Clark app, retail customers consolidate, compare and manage their insurance policies in one place, with Clark acting as the broker of record. The integration of the finanzen Group, agreed with Allianz X in November 2021, made Clark one of the largest insurtech groups in Europe.
Codoflow
Company
Codoflow is a German SaaS platform for collaborative data-architecture management, operated by Codoflow GmbH in Aschheim near Munich and represented by founder and managing director Stefan Opitz. It targets small and mid-sized enterprises and consultancies rather than large-enterprise architecture teams.
Cogia
Company
Germany-based artificial-intelligence and market-intelligence software company founded in 2010 by Pascal Lauria that operates publicly as Cogia AG following a 2021 listing on the Düsseldorf stock exchange. Cogia's stated strategic priority is to consolidate a fragmented European market for text- and data-analytics tooling by using public equity as acquisition currency. Cogia AG is the listed vehicle into which the original operating company Cogia Intelligence GmbH was merged.
Daniel Alfon
Person
Israel-based LinkedIn strategist, trainer, speaker and author, best known for his book Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success and for teaching professionals, founders and B2B sales teams how to use LinkedIn as a business-development platform. Advises international clients across Europe, including DACH founders and B2B teams, and has appeared as a guest on Startuprad.io and adjacent DACH founder-focused podcasts on the topic of LinkedIn for early-stage companies.
Daniel Amann
Person
Daniel Amann is an Austrian digital-health entrepreneur and co-founder of edupression (SOFY GmbH), a Klosterneuburg-based, CE-certified prescription digital-therapeutics programme for depression and burnout developed with the Medical University of Vienna, and a Startuprad.io founder-interview guest.
DeepL
Company
Cologne-based language-AI company, evolved out of the bilingual dictionary Linguee and launched as DeepL Translator in August 2017. Led by Jaroslaw Kutylowski, it has pivoted into enterprise software with DeepL Pro, Write, Voice and Agent, and announced a USD 300 million round at a USD 2 billion valuation in May 2024.
DeepMind
Company
London-headquartered artificial-intelligence research laboratory, founded in September 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman as DeepMind Technologies Limited and acquired by Google in January 2014 for a reported £400 million-plus. Now operates as Google DeepMind, the merged AI research arm of Alphabet formed in April 2023 by combining DeepMind and Google Brain. Landmark research programmes include AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold and the Gemini family of foundation models.
Delivery Hero
Company
Delivery Hero SE is a Berlin-headquartered online food-delivery and quick-commerce group, founded in 2011 by Niklas Östberg, Kolja Hebenstreit, Markus Fuhrmann and Lukasz Gadowski, that operates consumer brands including foodpanda, Glovo, talabat, PedidosYa and Baemin across roughly 70 markets. Its shares have been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker DHER since 2017.
Deutsche Bahn AG
Organization
Deutsche Bahn AG (DB) is the Berlin-headquartered German national railway company, 100% owned by the Federal Republic of Germany, organised as a joint-stock company (Aktiengesellschaft) under private law, and the operator of the country's principal long-distance passenger rail services (ICE and IC/EC), a large regional-rail franchise portfolio, and a heavy-rail freight and infrastructure business; it is the incumbent long-distance rail operator against which the open-access competitor FlixTrain (the rail subsidiary of Flix SE) has competed since 2018.
Deutsche Bank
Company
Frankfurt am Main-headquartered German global universal bank, founded in Berlin in 1870 and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (ticker DBK) with an additional listing on the New York Stock Exchange; organised across Corporate Bank, Investment Bank, Private Bank and Asset Management divisions (including DWS), and one of the most active corporate banking counterparties to the German Mittelstand and to the DACH startup and technology ecosystem.
Deutscher Startup Monitor
Award
Annual survey-based research report on the German startup ecosystem, published continuously since 2013 by the Bundesverband Deutsche Startups (Startup-Verband) in Berlin in partnership with the professional services firm PwC (with KPMG as a historical partner); one of the two canonical statistical baselines — alongside the KfW Gründungsmonitor — for tracking German startup demographics, funding, employment and sentiment.
Driverama
Company
Driverama is a pan-European online used-car platform launched in April 2021 by AURES Holdings — the Prague-based used-car group behind AAA Auto and Mototechna, controlled by private-equity firm Abris Capital Partners and founded by Anthony Denny. Note: Driverama is a subsidiary of AURES Holdings, not of AUTO1 Group. The company launched retail buying in Germany in July 2021, expanded to the Netherlands in January 2022 and to Berlin retail micro-branches in 2022. Reporting on any 2022 wind-down could not be independently verified at profile build; AURES Holdings continued to disclose Driverama within its brand portfolio in 2023 and 2024 sales reports.
EBAN
Organization
Brussels-headquartered non-profit European trade association for business angels, early-stage seed funds and other early-stage private-investor communities, founded in 1999 with support from the European Commission and EURADA. EBAN is the pan-European federation of national angel networks, angel groups and family offices; it runs the annual EBAN Congress, publishes the annual European Early-Stage Market Statistics report, and hosts the EBAN Awards. Members include national federations across the EU and DACH, including BAND (Germany), aaia (Austria) and SICTIC / SECA-linked groups in Switzerland.
