Felix
Fink.

A factory floor. A laser scanner. An AI that figures the rest out.

Every manufacturing plant in the world has a dirty secret: nobody really knows what's inside it. Not precisely. Not in a format that a robot can act on or a planner can simulate. Felix Fink decided to fix that.

RIIICO - which stands for "Realising factories in digital reality" - does one thing with ruthless focus: it takes raw LiDAR scan data from a factory floor and converts it into an AI-classified, collaboratively editable 3D digital twin. Not a dumb point cloud. A living model where walls know they're walls, machines know what they are, and pallets don't masquerade as structural columns.

The pitch is simple: send in a scanner for a day, get back a factory model that would have taken months to build manually. The technology behind it is anything but. RIIICO's proprietary deep learning algorithms process millions of points in 3D space, automatically recognizing building infrastructure, technical equipment, and shop floor machinery - then handing engineers a model ready to plug into Siemens Tecnomatix, NVIDIA Omniverse, or any CAD workflow they already use.

Fink studied Industrial Engineering at RWTH Aachen - one of Europe's elite engineering universities and a factory for founders as much as engineers. He and co-founders Jan Buchsenschutz and Patrick Mertens (who came from NVIDIA's Silicon Valley office) launched RIIICO in 2021. By 2024, Siemens was giving them an award. By mid-2025, Pi Labs had led a $5M seed round with backing from Earlybird Venture Capital, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, and seed+speed Ventures.

The angel investor list is equally notable: Joe Kaeser, the former Siemens CEO who presided over one of the world's most ambitious industrial digitalization programs, put his own money in. When the architect of Siemens' digital transformation era writes a check to a factory AI startup, the signal is clear.

What RIIICO actually delivers

Showing the work

From scan to simulation, without the manual grind

The RIIICO workflow starts with a scanner - NavVis, Faro, Leica, or any other compatible hardware - capturing a factory floor in standard E57 or PLY point cloud format. That raw data goes into RIIICO's platform, where deep learning takes over.

The AI recognizes three categories of objects with increasing specificity: building infrastructure (walls, floors, ceilings, structural elements), technical systems (pipes, cables, steel beams, utilities), and shop floor equipment (machines, racks, pallets, conveyors). The output is a classified, segmented 3D model - not a dumb mesh, but an intelligent object hierarchy that downstream tools can reason about.

From there, the model flows into the ecosystems manufacturers already use. RIIICO is an official partner application on Siemens Xcelerator, meaning the digital twin plugs directly into Tecnomatix and NX workflows. The company also connected its platform to NVIDIA Omniverse via OpenUSD - so factory planners can run photorealistic simulations, AI-driven process optimization, and collaborative design reviews in the same environment.

The scanner-agnostic approach is deliberate. Manufacturers already own hardware. RIIICO doesn't try to sell them new scanners - it makes the scanners they have dramatically more valuable.

The roster reads like a Dusseldorf trade fair floor plan

RIIICO's customer list is a cross-section of European industrial manufacturing: Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen, Schaeffler, and Schmitz Cargobull have all worked with the platform. The automotive sector in particular faces constant pressure to retool factory floors for new EV platforms - exactly the kind of brownfield retrofit scenario where RIIICO's speed advantage is sharpest.

Strategic partners extend beyond customers. Deloitte and Softserve bring consulting and implementation scale. The Siemens relationship - formalized through Xcelerator and validated with the Inventors of the Year award - gives RIIICO access to one of the world's deepest industrial software ecosystems. The NVIDIA Omniverse partnership connects the platform to the most serious industrial metaverse infrastructure currently in production.

The money that makes machines smarter

RIIICO's $5M Seed round closed in June 2025, led by Pi Labs - a London-based PropTech VC with a track record in built-environment software. The co-investor list is telling: Earlybird Venture Capital (one of Europe's most active deeptech funds), Volvo Cars Tech Fund (strategic, not just financial - Volvo is also a customer), seed+speed Ventures, and WaVe-X.

The angel investor who drew the most attention was Joe Kaeser, Siemens CEO from 2013 to 2021 - the executive who oversaw the company's own massive digital transformation and its €8.5B acquisition of Mentor Graphics. His backing is industrial validation as much as capital.

Prior to the seed round, RIIICO received the HTGF Deep Tech Award - a €600K grant from High-Tech Grunderfonds, one of Germany's main early-stage deeptech investors. Total funding across all rounds reached $6.5M by mid-2025.

Berkeley SkyDeck - UC Berkeley's prestigious accelerator - also gave the team a US foothold before the seed round, establishing a presence that reflects Fink's stated ambition to build a globally relevant platform rather than a German niche player.

From RWTH Aachen to Dusseldorf to Silicon Valley

The receipts

• Co-founded RIIICO in 2021, scaling to 40 employees and $6.5M total funding in four years
• Won Siemens Inventors of the Year 2024 in the Open Innovation category - the first startup ever to win in that category
• Raised $5M Seed round (2025) led by Pi Labs, with Earlybird Venture Capital and Volvo Cars Tech Fund co-investing
• Secured angel investment from Joe Kaeser, former CEO of Siemens AG
• Became an official partner application on Siemens Xcelerator - one of the world's most influential industrial software platforms
• Integrated RIIICO with NVIDIA Omniverse via OpenUSD, enabling next-generation factory visualization and simulation
• Graduated from UC Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator program - among the most competitive in the US
• Achieved 80% shorter 3D modeling time, 30% faster robot programming, 15% reduced project costs for customers
• Built scanner-agnostic platform supporting NavVis, Faro, and Leica - covering the industrial LiDAR hardware landscape
• Customers include Porsche, Volkswagen, Volvo, Schaeffler, and Schmitz Cargobull

What Fink actually believes about the factory floor

Fink's worldview is grounded in a specific observation about how manufacturing works in 2025: factory layouts are no longer competitive secrets. The advantage isn't in hiding the floor plan - it's in how fast a company can adapt, retool, and implement new technology across that floor plan.

That insight drives RIIICO's product logic. If speed-of-adaptation is the competitive variable, then the first bottleneck to remove is the time it takes to create an accurate, usable digital model of the factory. Remove that bottleneck - by replacing months of manual CAD work with a single day of scanning and AI processing - and everything downstream accelerates.

His framing of the startup-corporate dynamic is equally pragmatic. He sees startups and industrial corporations not as adversaries but as missing halves: startups have speed and technical novelty; corporations have domain depth and scale. The value - for customers, for investors, for the product - comes from combining them. RIIICO's Siemens partnership is the living proof of that thesis.

On the product side, Fink's stated orientation is simple: he drives the product by continuously searching for ways to increase customer value. That's not a mission statement - it's a design constraint. RIIICO builds for factory engineers and planners, and the measure of success is whether the tools they ship make those people's work faster, cheaper, and more accurate.