amber, an Aachen-based AI platform that enables small and medium-sized businesses to unlock and operationalise their organisational knowledge, today announced the close of a €7 million Series A round.
The round was co-led by Ventech, which has doubled down on its initial investment, and NRW.Venture, the venture capital fund of NRW.BANK.
“Today’s AI tools are still waiting for users to ask the right questions. Our vision is fundamentally different. We have been building an AI platform that understands what’s happening inside a company, recognises what needs to be done and proactively supports employees by executing tasks autonomously. And we’re excited to have won such renowned investors to back our approach,” said Bastian Maiworm, co-founder and CRO of amber.
Founded in 2021 by Maiworm, Philipp Reißel and Igli Manaj, amber is an AI platform that helps companies make internal knowledge accessible efficiently and in compliance with the GDPR. amber states that it combines traditional search, generative AI, assistant features, and automation into a single solution. It is building the infrastructure for autonomous AI in business, allowing AI to understand organisational context, identify user intent and execute workflows across enterprise data.
The company states that although organisations are investing heavily in AI, the challenge of enterprise data being fragmented across emails, documents, cloud applications and internal systems still remains unsolved. This fragmented data makes it difficult for AI to understand business context and deliver reliable results.
According to the German startup, while many AI solutions promise productivity gains, their performance is ultimately limited by the incompleteness of the underlying structure. At the same time, many organisations are facing a growing loss of institutional knowledge as experienced employees retire, often taking years of business-critical expertise with them.
amber claims to tackle this challenge and notes that as generative AI gained momentum, it was already focused on connecting, structuring and contextualising internal business data to make organisational knowledge accessible.
“Today, amber’s proprietary AI Data Layer creates a unified understanding of business information across enterprise systems before applying large language models. This not only enables AI to deliver more reliable answers, generate meaningful insights and increasingly automate complex business workflows, but also significantly improves token efficiency by providing AI with structured, relevant context instead of forcing models to process large volumes of unstructured data,” the company mentioned in the press release.
amber highlights that it understands the underlying business context, not just keywords, and provides accurate answers based on the company’s collective knowledge, preserving expertise even as experienced employees leave the workforce.
“AI’s next evolution is not another chatbot. The future belongs to systems that understand business context, recognise user intent and autonomously complete work. That’s exactly what we’re building with amber and this funding allows us to accelerate that vision and bring it to businesses across Europe,” said Philipp Reißel, co-founder and CEO of amber.
amber supports organisations across manufacturing, engineering, IT consulting and the consumer goods industry. Its customers include leading companies such as Scheidt & Bachmann, Ritter Sport, Zentis, Schüßler-Plan, Dalli and Hailo.
“As amber’s first institutional investor, we are backing the team again 18 months following our initial check. They have identified early three of the defining problems of this AI cycle: turning AI into a competitive advantage, lifting the token yield customers actually get from generalists models while preserving data ownership and finally enabling organisations to discover, govern, and scale the right agents, skills, and workflows amid accelerating AI sprawl. By making the right architecture decisions, they built a solid system of context that now underpins the reliable management of agents and their context across hundreds of customers in parallel,” said Nicolas Barthalon, Partner at Ventech.
The company plans to use this capital to accelerate its expansion across Europe, starting with the Benelux region, while continuing to invest heavily in its proprietary AI data layer. Going forward, the company will further deepen integrations with business systems, strengthen AI adoption among SMEs, and evolve its platform from today’s user-driven workflows toward an autonomous AI system that proactively executes work.
Located in Aachen, Cologne and Tirana, the company is expanding its European footprint following its first customer wins in the Benelux region.