Raisin is a Berlin-based fintech that runs a pan-European and US savings and investment marketplace, letting retail customers shop competitive interest rates across hundreds of partner banks from a single account, while giving banks an on-demand channel to gather deposits. Beyond its consumer marketplace, Raisin licenses white-label 'savings-as-a-service' technology to financial institutions and offers ETF, pension and investment products. The company surpassed one million customers, turned profitable in 2022 after a decade of operation, and intermediates tens of billions of euros in deposits across more than 30 markets.
Bill Lin is the Deputy CEO and Board Member of One Mobility GmbH, the automotive arm of Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), headquartered in Reutlingen, Germany. With a career spanning supply chain management, management consulting, and EV business leadership at Foxconn, Lin bridges Taiwan's electronics manufacturing powerhouse with Germany's century-old automotive precision engineering heritage. He also serves as Chief Integration Officer at FIT, steering the integration of One Mobility's 11,000-person global workforce across 40+ locations in 17 countries following the 2024 acquisition of Auto-Kabel Group.
Daedalus is an AI-driven precision manufacturing company building software-defined factories that produce high-precision parts for defense, medtech, semiconductors and industrial customers. Founded by former OpenAI Robotics technical lead Jonas Schneider, the company pairs off-the-shelf CNC hardware with its proprietary Manufacturing AI Platform to automate the work that traditionally requires veteran machinists - quoting, process planning, machine control and quality inspection - and runs it all out of a 50,000-square-foot factory in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Laura Behrens Wu is the founder and CEO of Shippo, a San Francisco-based shipping platform that she built after getting frustrated trying to ship handbags from her own e-commerce store. What started as a personal pain point in 2013 became a unicorn company valued at over $1 billion, serving 100,000+ merchants with a multi-carrier shipping API. Born in Germany and raised across four continents - China, Ecuador, Egypt, and Germany - Laura dropped out of her master's program at University of St. Gallen to move to San Francisco, interned at a Y Combinator startup, and co-founded Shippo at 28. She tracked 125 investor conversations, absorbed 115+ rejections, and raised $154.3M in total funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, and D1 Capital Partners, including a $50M Series E in 2021.
CatalYm is a German clinical-stage biotech developing visugromab, a GDF-15 neutralizing monoclonal antibody designed to reverse immunotherapy resistance in solid tumors and address cancer cachexia.
Philipp Dettmer is the founder, CEO, and head writer of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, the Munich-based animation studio and YouTube channel with over 25 million subscribers and 3.6 billion views. Starting as a university passion project in 2013, Kurzgesagt has grown into a 70-person studio that transforms dense scientific, philosophical, and technological ideas into visually stunning, widely-shared short films. Dettmer is also the author of 'Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive' (2021) and co-creator of the video game Star Birds, launched in early access in September 2025.
Carsten Helbing is the COO and Co-CEO of Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, the $5.8 billion joint venture headquartered in Palo Alto that is building the software and electrical architecture stack for a new generation of software-defined vehicles. A mechanical engineer by training who spent more than two decades at Volkswagen - rising from graduate engineer to Group Chief Technology Engineer - Helbing now leads a ~1,500-person organisation alongside Rivian co-CEO Wassym Bensaid, bridging German engineering discipline with Silicon Valley's software-first culture to redefine how cars are built, updated, and experienced.
Felix Fink is the co-founder and CEO of RIIICO, a German deeptech startup building AI-powered 3D factory digital twins using LiDAR point cloud data. Founded in 2021 out of RWTH Aachen University, RIIICO transforms physical factory floors into collaborative, predictive digital environments in a fraction of the time traditional modeling takes. The company raised a $5M seed round in 2025 led by Pi Labs, won the Siemens Inventors of the Year 2024 award in the Open Innovation category, and counts Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen, and Schaeffler among its customers. Fink drives product strategy with a philosophy of combining startup agility with deep industrial knowledge.
Cornelius Menke is a former Partner at Sequoia Capital, where he spent roughly three years building the firm's European investment portfolio from London. A German national educated at the Stockholm School of Economics, Menke moved from management consulting at Boston Consulting Group to venture capital after an earlier stint inside Klarna's CFO office - one of Sequoia's landmark European bets. At Sequoia, he backed companies across industrial automation, AI infrastructure, and enterprise fintech, co-investing in Robco, Tacto, LangChain, Flow, Pennylane, and Rillet while also running the firm's Arc accelerator cohorts for European pre-seed and seed founders. He departed Sequoia in 2025/2026 and his next move remains to be announced.
The BMW X5 PHEV is a luxury midsize plug-in hybrid SUV that pairs a 3.0-liter inline-six with a 194hp electric motor for 483hp combined, delivering up to 38 miles of all-electric range, a 4.6-second 0-60 sprint, and the practicality of a family hauler without surrendering the Ultimate Driving Machine ethos.
Christoph Molnar is a Munich-based statistician-turned-ML-author who turned a side project into the field's most-cited book on interpretable machine learning. Author of six books including the canonical 'Interpretable Machine Learning' (3rd ed., 2025), he runs the Mindful Modeler newsletter and consults on making black-box models explainable. With 16,000+ Google Scholar citations and a PhD from LMU Munich, he sits at the precise intersection where statistical rigor meets machine learning pragmatism.
Thorsten Ball is a German software engineer, author, and technical educator best known for his self-published books 'Writing an Interpreter in Go' and 'Writing a Compiler in Go', which have become go-to resources for developers wanting to understand programming language internals. With over two decades of professional software development experience, he currently works at Sourcegraph on Amp, an AI-powered coding agent. He also writes the weekly newsletter 'Register Spill', covering systems programming, developer tools, and the intersection of AI with software engineering.
Osman Ali Mian is an early-career AI researcher specializing in causal discovery and trustworthy machine learning. He completed his PhD magna cum laude at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Saarland University, Germany) and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) in Essen. He has published at top-tier venues including AAAI, ICML, AISTATS, and KDD, and won an Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2026 — marking him as a rising star in causal ML.
SAP CRM, now branded as SAP Customer Experience (SAP CX), is the customer relationship management portfolio of SAP SE — Germany's largest software company and the world's leading enterprise application vendor. Founded in 1972, SAP CRM has evolved from an on-premise suite launched in 2000 into a comprehensive cloud-native platform encompassing Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud (Emarsys), Commerce Cloud, and Customer Data solutions. Serving 98 of the world's top 100 companies and over 425,000 customers globally, SAP CX differentiates itself through deep native integration with SAP ERP/S4HANA and AI capabilities via its Joule copilot, enabling end-to-end business process automation from back-office operations to customer-facing interactions.