An entrepreneur builds a company around making better decisions. Then comes a particularly awkward decision: whether he should still be running it. For Markus Linder, that question arrived while Zoovu was growing. Success had brought a new job description, and he was paying attention to the small print.
He had helped turn a student venture in Vienna into a business selling digital advice to international brands. By September 2017, SMARTASSISTANT, as the company was then known, had raised a €5 million Series A led by Beringea. Microsoft, Canon and T-Mobile were customers. The money would support expansion in New York and other markets. There was plenty to keep a founder occupied.
Yet Linder liked the beginning of a business: assembling people around an idea, testing a strategy, persuading the first customers. A larger organisation required more time spent making established operations run well. His answer was to arrange a succession, help with the handover and, in 2019, leave daily operations. A company devoted to choosing had produced a founder willing to choose something else.
A mattress is a surprisingly good place to begin
Consider the mattress. Latex, springs, memory foam: a shop can present an impressive amount of information without helping anyone decide where to sleep. Linder used this example when explaining SMARTASSISTANT in 2016. Technical categories meant something to the seller. The customer still had to translate them into an answer to a personal question.
His business offered interactive digital advisers that asked about needs and guided people toward suitable products. This was a practical criticism of online retail. A catalogue can be perfectly organised and still leave a visitor bewildered. More filters do not automatically supply the missing judgment. Sometimes the useful question is much plainer than the product specification.
That interest in the buyer also travelled into his writing. In a 2018 article about business purchasing, Linder examined freemium software, personalisation and the need to reduce perceived risk. A purchase, in this view, depended on confidence as well as availability. The customer needed a reason to take the next step. The screen had to do some of the work once performed by a patient conversation.
Vienna, with a few instructive departures
Linder is from Schladming, Austria, and studied International Business Administration at WU in Vienna. His education included periods in Belgium and Chile. The geography matters because he later connected those experiences with a willingness to operate across cultures, a useful habit for someone whose first company would sell far beyond Austria.
At university, he concentrated on entrepreneurship and innovation alongside international marketing and management. He has described accessible professors who would discuss business ideas, and the practical value of learning to prepare and present a business plan. He started his first company while still studying. The lecture room and the customer meeting were already overlapping.
His public career history also includes an internship with the Austrian trade office in Santiago and responsibility for international affairs in the WU students’ association. These are modest entries beside later funding rounds, but they give the early career some texture. Long before a software business had overseas offices, its future founder was working out how institutions, people and markets connected across borders.
The founder hands over the keys
In April 2019, Linder announced his departure with a joke about his first entrepreneurial child growing up and moving out. Then he corrected the joke: he was the one leaving. His farewell was affectionate, but its underlying point was exact. The work he enjoyed and the work the business required had begun to diverge.
The CEO handover had already happened in March 2018. Linder stayed to help with the transition before taking a sabbatical. The business had evolved from services into a self-service software platform, and its reach had expanded across languages and countries. His co-founders Martin and Svetlana remained important to its next phase.
There is a useful distinction here between starting a company and occupying its central chair indefinitely. Founders are often described through endurance: stay longer, push harder, insist again. Linder’s departure adds another possibility. A founder can care about the company’s future enough to recognise that the next stage may suit someone else. The decision carries a certain irony for a business built to offer advice.
“to shape our vision”
Markus Linder, on the founder work he enjoyed, 2019
Three months north, then back to the shopping basket
The break included three months travelling through northern Europe with his family. Time outdoors sharpened his concern about environmental damage. He returned to entrepreneurship with a focus on businesses that could address climate change and biodiversity loss across markets. His next venture, inoqo, was founded in 2020.
The initial consumer proposition began with an ordinary supermarket receipt. Scan the shopping, learn about the associated environmental footprint and see alternatives that might better match personal priorities. A 2021 retail report described testing with purchases from Billa and Spar. The receipt became a record of consequences as well as prices.
Inoqo’s early participation in Austria’s greenstart programme brought coaching, contact with other teams and help with developing its prototype. Its presentation there described product information and gamification as ways to make sustainable choices easier. The intended mechanism was commercial as much as educational: better informed demand might encourage producers to change what they supplied.
The ambition was demanding in a wonderfully mundane setting. Most shopping is done between other obligations. A person can care about forests and still want to finish buying dinner. Any useful tool would have to respect that shortage of time. Linder had returned to the same practical problem that interested him in online retail: making a complicated decision easier to act on.
The shopping list gets a business model
Inoqo subsequently shifted toward selling software to food retailers, brands and suppliers. That changed the point at which it tried to influence a purchase. Instead of beginning only with a consumer examining a completed shop, it could help companies examine products and supply chains before those products reached the basket.
A company webinar about the transition drew on three years of experience with the consumer app. Linder and co-founder Hélène Saurais discussed engagement, communication and what retailers could learn from that earlier work. The app had supplied experience with real behaviour. The business platform offered a different route for putting that experience to use.
By October 2023, inoqo was discussing a new seven-figure financing round and its partnership with Norwegian online grocer Oda. Investors included Runtastic co-founder Christian Kaar and Linder’s own investment vehicle. These relationships put some specific names behind the shift from an individual shopper’s tool to a service bought by businesses.
Albert Heijn supplied another concrete example. In 2024, the Dutch retailer began sharing climate-impact information for roughly 1,100 private-label food and beverage products, working with inoqo. Linder described a system that could begin with public data and incorporate more detailed information about ingredients, origin, packaging and electricity as it became available.
That incremental approach matters. A footprint is an assessment built from inputs and assumptions. Better product information can improve it. The attraction for a retailer is the chance to identify where changes might help, while giving customers a clearer view of what they buy. The value depends on the work behind the number, however tidy the number looks on a screen.
- 2020A shopper’s receipt
Consumer app - 2023A retailer’s assortment
Business software - 2026Connected supply chains
Mondra merger announced
A second way to stay near the beginning
Entrepreneurship also became part of Linder’s investing life. Triple Impact Investment GmbH was registered in Vienna in April 2022, with Linder as managing director. Its public-facing name is Triple Impact Ventures. The vehicle concentrates on early businesses addressing climate, biodiversity and pollution, co-investing with other angels and funds.
The stated focus is European pre-seed and seed companies, across software and hardware, with the potential to operate internationally. It is a recognisable extension of his preference for the early stages. Investing gives him another way to remain close to founders while they are still turning an uncertain proposition into a working company.
His 2026 conference biography names investments including Emidat, Atmen, E-mobilio, Farmless, Repath, Kolum and Hula Earth. These ventures take his involvement beyond grocery software. Together they show the breadth of the environmental brief he has chosen, even as his operating career remains rooted in the question of how people and businesses decide.
The next decision is to join forces
On 17 February 2026, Mondra and inoqo announced an agreement to merge. The planned combined business would use the Mondra name, with Linder joining its leadership team to contribute to international growth and strategy. The announcement made completion subject to regulatory approvals and anticipated it in the second quarter.
The accompanying explanation centred on joining product information with supply-chain and carbon data. Inoqo brought its assessment expertise and European relationships; Mondra brought its own technology and retail network. In his public response, Linder emphasised resilience alongside emissions: the business case had widened to include understanding environmental risks within food supply chains.
It is another change in the shape of the organisation around him. A student business became a software company; an app became a retailer platform; that platform reached an agreement to become part of a combined operation. Through these changes, Linder has kept returning to decisions that seem simple until someone asks what information is missing.
The mattress needed a question a buyer could answer. The supermarket receipt needed context beyond its total. A founder needed to decide when to hand over. Linder’s career has accumulated different businesses around that recurring difficulty. Giving someone more information is easy enough. Helping them use it has kept him busy for two decades.