berlin-startup
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Hannes Lenke
Hannes Lenke is the CEO and co-founder of Checkly, a code-first synthetic monitoring platform that helps engineering teams detect and resolve production issues faster. A serial founder in the software testing and reliability space, he earlier built TestObject, a mobile testing startup acquired by Sauce Labs in 2016, where he then ran EMEA operations. He teamed up with Tim Nolet and Timo Euteneuer to launch Checkly, popularizing the 'Monitoring as Code' approach built around Playwright and OpenTelemetry. Checkly has raised $32.25M to date, including a $20M Series B led by Balderton Capital in 2024.
Maik Wehmeyer
Maik Taro Wehmeyer is the co-founder and CEO of Taktile, an AI decision platform that helps banks, insurers, and fintechs automate high-stakes risk decisions like credit underwriting, onboarding, fraud detection, and claims. A Harvard-trained statistician and former QuantCo, McKinsey, and Bosch alum, he started Taktile in 2020 with fellow Harvard classmate Maximilian Eber after they repeatedly rebuilt the same decision infrastructure for enterprise clients. In June 2026 the company raised a $110M Series C led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, bringing total funding to roughly $189M, and now serves more than 150 financial institutions from offices in New York, London, and Berlin.
Marius Meiners
Marius Meiners is the co-founder and CEO of Peec AI, a Berlin company that tells brands whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini mention them - and how. A former top-100 League of Legends player who later worked in venture capital and M&A at PwC before joining Antler's Berlin cohort, he vibe-coded Peec's first prototype in a day and a half with V0 after not writing code for four years, signed eight letters of intent before building the real product, and priced it at 85 euros a month while competitors charged 500-plus. Peec launched in February 2025 and crossed roughly 10 million dollars in annualized revenue about 15 months later, raising about 29 million dollars from investors including Singular, 20VC, and Antler.
Tom Laband
Tom Laband is the co-founder and CEO of Adsquare, a Berlin-born location-intelligence company he started in 2012 with Sebastian Doerfel and Fritz Richter. Adsquare runs a neutral data exchange that turns consented location signals into audience data for programmatic advertising, and Laband has spent more than a decade arguing that location is a durable, privacy-compliant alternative to the crumbling world of online identifiers. A University of Mannheim graduate who cut his teeth in early European mobile advertising at YOC and Sevenval, he now splits his attention between the company's Berlin engineering base and its commercial push in New York.
Jenny von Podewils
Jenny von Podewils is the co-CEO and co-founder of Leapsome, the people enablement platform she launched in Berlin in 2016 with Kajetan von Armansperg. After bootstrapping the company to roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue, the pair raised a $60 million Series A in March 2022 led by Insight Partners - their first outside money in six years. Trained at St. Gallen, Oxford, and Singularity University, she relocated from Berlin to New York in early 2023 to scale Leapsome's U.S. business, and was named Female Founder of the Year at the 2023 German Startup Awards.
Kemal Levi
Kemal Levi is the founder and CEO of Relimetrics, an industrial AI company splitting its headquarters between Sunnyvale and Berlin. A Stanford-trained materials scientist who once measured how skin behaves under stress for the cosmetics industry, he now builds ReliVision, a no-code, GenAI-powered platform that lets factories teach machines to spot their own defects. He has spent more than fifteen years turning non-destructive testing and computer vision into shop-floor software, and counts NVIDIA's Inception program among Relimetrics' backers.
Malte Kosub
Malte Kosub is the co-founder and CEO of Parloa, a Berlin-born enterprise AI company building agentic AI for customer service. He started his first company in 11th grade, founded the conversational AI agency Future of Voice in 2017, and spun out Parloa in 2018. In January 2026 Parloa raised a $350M Series D at a $3 billion valuation - tripling its worth in eight months. Kosub has stated his ambition to build a $100 billion company out of Germany.