For some reason, I struggle to see Berlin as a deep-tech hub. Most startups there seem to focus on consumer-facing products—like Zalando, Flink, and HelloFresh. In contrast, Munich is clearly leading the way in deep-tech within Germany. The investments raised by companies like Helsing and Isar likely surpass the combined funding of all the startups listed on that page. Munich also benefits from strong technical universities and the presence of major R&D offices from companies like Apple and NVIDIA.
Germany is much less centralized than every other bigger Western economy in every aspect including (deep tech) startups. Some German deep tech companies that come into my mind:
Why even bother? Even the website is broken on mobile.
There is no "German startup culture" and there won't ever be, unless very drastic changes are made to labor and corporate laws. Germany does not want start-ups to exist.
A 100% this. Germany is a country where you either are born rich or you work for someone else. Nothing in between. Everything is institutinalised. There is no room for founders, entrepreneurs.
German „VC“ funds like: „Has this concept ever been implemented? Yes? Was it successful? Yes? Then let’s talk. Leading to endless clones/copycats, only few original ideas.
studiVZ was a clone of Facebook. Zalando a clone of Amazon. The Samwer brothers were very successful with this strategy. And there is an endless list of clones.
There was an attempt at recreating YC in Germany, failed miserably.
You don’t have the hacker mindset in Germany. Neither do you have many investors taking very high risks and bets.
Btw: You should avoid getting financed by IBB. They will demand shitloads of paperwork from you for small amounts of investments
They had a lot of anarchy and counter culture, particularly amongst East German Engineers, simply as part of the social fabric and societal makeup of East/West Germany pre-Unification.
Unfortunately the basis of 'startup culture' in 21st Century America is 'move fast, break things' and 'scale first, apologise later' which is anathema in a highly regulated and bureaucratic culture like present day Germanys'.
Give that their post-WW2 success came from regulated financial services provisioning, and high-precision machining and engineering products shipped out of the Rhine river basin, it's not hard to understand why Berlin's mindset is distinctively not that of the American Pioneer in the West.
It's effectively seed funding for early stage startups:
> Geplant ist die Finanzierung von 50 Startups über Wandeldarlehen zwischen 100.000 und 300.000 Euro mit einer Laufzeit von ein bis zwei Jahren, die dann in eine offene Beteiligung gewandelt werden
And with 100k you can even have a single developer working full time for a year! That will surely lead to groundbreaking new solutions, rivaling US tech giants.
I know that what the company has higher cost that the gross salary, but e.g. the EXIST founder's stipend will pay you 2500€/month if you have a university degree (30k/year), the rates at privately funded companies aren't much higher.
Having tried the whole startup thing in Berlin.. then comparing financing opportunities in say.. London… honestly I don’t think there’s much in favor of deep tech startups in Berlin other than .. a lot of universities being physically present in Berlin. The business mindset is just.. too narrow. The only path I could think of is a phd thesis turn company via private investment… and I fail to see how Berlin is different than say .. Freiburg on that regard.
IMHO, what you get in Berlin is a lot of little copycats of successful American companies on the consumer level .. with recent graduates being paid poorly because that is what berlin allows.. low pay.. low tech.. low risk startups.. or just people attracted to the “cool” vibe of the city.. hardly an incentive for deep tech. To me, the perfect case study is Rocket Internet. There is no way any deep tech startup would come from there.
To get a deep tech startup to work you need to pay good wages to highly specialized people working on a project for a few years and there’s nothing special about berlin to enable that… except a lot of universities. But then again.. you could do the same thing in any other German city and it wouldn’t be any different.
EONs ago I've been to some start-up founding/marketing/schooling event in Berlin, and left early, having to suppress my urge to laugh out loud very hard.
Another typical thing for that 'scene' comes to mind, wherein some dudes got a price for a thing shaped like a pyramid with maybe 35 to 45 cm side length, intended to work as a Home/Soho NAS, with very underpowered COTS innards, and shitty software/crappy UI, lacking general functionality.
Intended sales price? 5000EUR!
Yay!
But painted very industrial looking orange. Phew! Hardcore!
That may be over-generalized, there may be some hidden champions there, but they rarely make a public impression.
Hm. Maybe AVM, considering their market share in the DACH area. I don't like them, but they are less trashy than most other stuff in that market segment, and mostly do work reliably. Just not in ways I'd have liked ;>
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