- amber has secured €7 million in Series A funding, with Ventech and NRW.Venture leading the round.
- The German startup creates AI agents that can act autonomously.
- Its data layer is said to cut AI token costs by as much as 60%.
amber, an AI startup based in Aachen, has raised €7 million in a Series A round co-led by Ventech and NRW.Venture, which is the venture arm of the German state development bank NRW.BANK.
The company wants to move AI beyond just answering questions, so it can take action on its own. “We want the helper everyone needs in their everyday work, with all the context your best coworker would give you at the right time,” says Philipp Reißel, amber’s co-founder and chief executive, in an interview with Tech Funding News.
The German startup is working toward a similar transformation as its much larger competitor Glean, a Palo Alto company valued at $7.2 billion in 2025. Both companies focus on enterprise AI that works within company systems rather than just through a chat interface. The main differences are their size and where they operate.
From a shared apartment to building enterprise AI
amber was founded in 2021 by Reißel, Bastian Maiworm, and Igli Manaj, who were all connected to RWTH Aachen University. Before transformer models became widely used, Reißel and Manaj were already working on this AI technology, which now powers large language models.
Maiworm brought business experience from his family background. He noticed that as IT systems grow, it becomes harder to keep important company knowledge when experienced employees leave.
“It’s quite difficult with large IT infrastructures to ensure that, once people retire, their knowledge remains accessible,” he says.
The startup creates a data layer under its search, chat, and agent tools. This layer brings together a company’s documents, images, presentations, and records from customer and resource planning systems into one organized place before the AI models use them.
“The competition for models is more or less over. The quality of responses depends on the context you ingest,” Reißel says.
By organising data in advance, amber can lower AI token costs by up to 60%, depending on how it’s used. Some of amber’s biggest customers, such as engineering and construction firms, use this system to quickly find details from years of past projects without searching by hand.
A sovereignty pitch
Amber stands out from Glean and Microsoft’s Copilot for reasons beyond just technical ones. The company runs on a German cloud, has no American shareholders, and is not affected by the US Cloud Act. This law lets US authorities request data from American companies, regardless of where it is stored.
“What’s happening at amber is decided by European minds,” Maiworm says.
That framing is echoed by amber’s newest backer. “amber tackles a specific challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises by making existing knowledge directly accessible and usable,” said Johanna Antonie Tjaden-Schulte, a member of NRW.BANK’s managing board.
Patrick Nesseler, an investment manager at NRW.BANK, said amber “has built a strong technological foundation that combines deep enterprise knowledge with autonomous AI capabilities.”
What the money buys
Ventech first backed amber in March 2025 with a €2.1 million check. Nicolas Barthalon, a partner at the firm, said the company had “identified early three of the defining problems of this AI cycle.”
Reißel says that early investment played an important role in this round: “One of our early investors followed up with a substantial ticket showing conviction in our execution skills, which encouraged other investors to participate.”
amber employs 60 people and has more than 400 active customers, including Ritter Sport and Scheidt & Bachmann. The company plans to use the new funding to expand into Benelux and later into the Nordics.
