Aachen-based startup amber just landed €7 million to push enterprise AI beyond answering questions and into taking action. Ventech and NRW.Venture co-led the Series A round, with NRW.Venture serving as the investment arm of Germany’s state development bank NRW.BANK.
The funding signals growing demand for AI tools that operate inside company systems rather than through standalone chat interfaces. Amber’s pitch: a data layer that organizes documents, images, presentations, and customer records before AI models touch them. That approach, the company claims, cuts AI token costs by up to 60 percent.
Philipp Reißel, co-founder and CEO, frames the mission around workplace utility. “We want the assistant everyone needs in their everyday work, with all the context your best coworker would give you at the right time,” he said.
Founded in 2021 by Reißel, Bastian Maiworm, and Igli Manaj, all linked to RWTH Aachen University, amber started working on transformer models before they became the backbone of large language models. Maiworm saw firsthand how institutional knowledge disappears when veteran employees leave large IT environments.
“It’s quite difficult with large IT infrastructures to ensure that, once people retire, their knowledge remains accessible,” Maiworm said.
The startup positions itself as a European alternative to Glean, the Palo Alto company valued at $7.2 billion in 2025, and Microsoft’s Copilot. Amber runs on German cloud infrastructure, holds no American shareholders, and falls outside the US Cloud Act, which lets US authorities demand data from American firms regardless of storage location.
“What’s happening at amber is decided by European minds,” Maiworm said.
NRW.BANK managing board member Johanna Antonie Tjaden-Schulte noted amber “tackles a specific challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises by creating existing knowledge directly accessible and usable.”
Meanwhile, Ventech partner Nicolas Barthalon said the company “identified early three of the defining problems of this AI cycle.” Ventech first backed amber in March 2025 with a €2.1 million check.
The startup now employs 60 people and serves more than 400 active customers, including Ritter Sport and Scheidt & Bachmann. Expansion plans target Benelux first, followed by the Nordics.
