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Located at the heart of Europe, Berlin is a junction at which cultures and traditions meet—and the city has a startup scene to match. The German capital is home to a mix of startups from all corners of the economy, from fintech to foodtech. In Berlin, says Christian Gaiser, founder of hospitality startup numa, “no one cares where you come from,”—a value reflected in the businesses the city produces.
Others, like Mazen Rizk, founder of foodtech Mushlabs, value the city’s laid-back and non-corporate climate. Berlin’s “rockstar startup spirit,” says Rizk, makes for a tight-knit network of entrepreneurs that feed off the experience and contact books of their peers.
But don’t be fooled by the informal disposition; Berlin is also the setting for some of the largest venture capital raises in Europe, including a $1.13 billion Series C raised by online brokerage Trade Republic. Under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the German administration is also readying new measures, from tax allowances to improved access to credit, to ensure Berlin remains a magnet for new startups and investors alike.
Infinite Roots
Infinite Roots is tapping into the power of the humble mushroom to solve issues in areas ranging from climate breakdown to food security. Founded in 2018 by Mazen Rizk, Anne-Cathrine Hutz, and Thibault Godard, the startup (previously known as Mushlabs) uses fermentation tanks to replicate natural growth conditions for mycelium, the network of fungal threads from which mushrooms sprout. Fed with byproducts of the food industry—such as waste from beer production—the mycelium is then turned into meat alternatives.
“The way we grow mycelium is more efficient than anything else; it uses a fraction of the water needed for plant- and animal-based agriculture, and it grows in a fraction of the time,” explains Rizk. The result is a meat proxy that has all the same antioxidants and fiber, but none of the cholesterol. It looks and cooks like meat, too. Infinite Roots has raised more than €20 million in funding from investors including the European Innovation Council Fund, Happiness Capital, and Redalpine. infiniteroots.com
Bunch
Bunch is a startup for startups. The pitch: make it easier for businesses to coordinate new funding and for VCs to launch new funds. These processes typically involve an avalanche of paperwork and hefty legal fees—and are made more complex by variations in legal and tax requirements across Europe. “All the stuff you need to do to be compliant is wild,” explains Levent Altunel, Bunch cofounder. Bunch’s software relieves startups of the bureaucratic burden and cuts the costs of private market investment by giving founders and fund managers an already-compliant foundation on which to manage deals, build funds, or pool investors.
Since the startup was founded in 2021 by Altunel and Enrico Ohnemuller, it has built a customer base that represents $250 million in assets under management, including investors like Pip Klöckner and Equation. It has also raised €8 million in seed funding (using its own platform, of course), led by Cherry Ventures and Embedded Capital. bunch.capital
numa
Christian Gaiser spent his early years living in a hotel in Germany’s Black Forest. It was this “18-year apprenticeship,” as he calls it, that gave rise to numa. Founded by Gaiser in 2019, alongside Dimitri Chandogin and Gerhard Maringer, numa is a hotel chain with a twist: Every room has a unique aesthetic, and every stay is made easier by digital tools for check-in and support. The aim is to achieve the perfect compromise, explains Gaiser, between a bland hotel and a rough-around-the-edges Airbnb. “We are democratizing the boutique experience—doing the best of both,” he says.
DN Capital, Headline, Cherry Ventures, and Soravia have all contributed to the $74 million raised by numa, most recently as part of a $45 million Series B. The startup has added almost 4,000 rooms to its portfolio across 25 European cities—including Berlin, Prague, and Vienna—but in the year ahead, that money will fund further expansion. numastays.com
SLAY
In October 2022, SLAY published an app that gives teenagers a way to compliment one another anonymously. Within a week, it had rocketed to the top of the app charts in Germany. The kids loved it. Built by cofounders Fabian Kamberi, Jannis Ringwald, and Stefan Quernhorst—all in their early twenties—the app is designed in response to the toxicity frequently seen on social media. Users receive a series of prompts—for instance, “Who has the best music taste?”—and four school peers to choose between.
Backed to the tune of $2.6 million by Accel, angel investor Harry Stebbings, and others, SLAY hopes to repeat its initial success with new apps targeting the same demographic. Already, the startup’s second app, frfr, which uses AI filters to let users record messages in the voice of celebrities, has accrued more than 1 million downloads and risen to the second spot in US app charts. slay.cool
Formo
From camembert to feta, cream cheese to cheddar, Formo has an animal-free alternative. Established in 2019 by Raffael Wohlgensinger and Britta Winterberg, the startup is Europe’s first cellular agriculture company. It uses milk proteins produced by special microorganisms to synthesize dairy ingredients. By removing cows from the equation, Formo slashes the greenhouse emissions associated with cattle.
Formo has raised one of the largest funding rounds in European foodtech—a €42 million Series A, led by EQT ventures—and, in the last year, has branched out with its first egg-replacement product, too. Pending regulatory approval, it hopes to bring its product to market later this year. formo.bio
Secfix
For small businesses with equally small budgets, complying with data security regulations can be an ordeal. Fabiola Munguia, Grigory Emelianov, and Branko Džakula have come up with a way to automate the process. Secfix, started by the trio in 2021, plugs into its customers’ IT systems and detects abnormalities in the way data is housed. By automating the laborious audit process, Secfix brings customers into compliance with security standards like ISO 27001, GDPR, and TISAX within five weeks. From then on, checks are performed on an hourly basis.
Octopus Ventures, Neosfer, and various angels contributed to a $3.8 million seed round raised by Secfix in March, to go towards building out its European customer base. secfix.com
Mondu
Increasingly, businesses are embracing “buy now, pay later.” Founded by Gil Danziger, Malte Huffmann, and Philipp Povel in 2021, Mondu gives B2B companies a way to offer delayed payments or payment by installments.
Mondu takes on all the risk; its customers get paid up-front in full, even if the buyer spreads payment over a number of months. Thousands of firms are already using the service, in industries from beauty to manufacturing. Last year, Mondu raised a $13 million Series A extension from Valar Ventures, Cherry Ventures, and others, bringing total funding to $70 million. It has also expanded into Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, and other new territories. mondu.ai
Pitch
Pitch is Germany’s challenger to Microsoft PowerPoint. The app offers features such as live video collaboration—whereby each person’s feed appears in a bubble next to their cursor—intended to make remotely co-developing a slide deck simpler. A point-and-click control system also makes for a less finicky design experience.
Since founding Pitch in 2018, Christian Reber, Adam Renklint, Vanessa Stock, Charlette Prévot, Misha Karpenko, Eric Labod, Marvin Labod, and Jan Martin have raised more than $135 million. Two and a half years after public launch, the app has been used for more than a million presentations. pitch.com
topi
Owning hardware may soon become a thing of the past, particularly for businesses. Established in 2021 by Charlotte Pallua and Estelle Merle, topi gives retailers a way to rent out hardware at a monthly rate. For now, the focus is on electronics; topi has secured deals with seven IT retailers in Germany and Austria, including GRAVIS and COMSPOT, with laptops making around 60 percent of sales. As the B2B subscription economy expands, topi aims to fill the gap for an industry-agnostic service that works equally well for furniture, cars, and more. To date, topi has raised $50 million, from Index Ventures, TriplePoint Capital, and various angels. topi.eu
Karla
Started by Philippe Padrock and Frederik Schröder in 2021, Karla lets shoppers track, reschedule, redirect, and return all of their parcels from a single app, irrespective of who’s handling the delivery. There’s a pitch for couriers too: By reducing the number of redundant deliveries, Karla aims to drastically minimize both emissions and costs, half of which are typically incurred in the last mile. Backed by €4.6 million in seed funding from investors including 468 Capital and La Famiglia, the firm has partnered with more than 20 merchants to date, and all the largest couriers in Germany. gokarla.io
This article appears in the January/February 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
Updated 13-12-2023, 13:51 GMT: This article was updated to reflect the new name of Infinite Roots (previously Mushlabs)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
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