Last Updated: 17 August 2026
amber, a German startup, wants to change how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) work with their own company knowledge. Founded in Aachen by Bastian Maiworm, Philipp Reißel, and Igli Manaj, the company builds an AI platform that connects to a business's existing data, from emails and documents to cloud tools and internal systems, and makes all of it searchable and usable for employees.
The gap between large and small enterprises in AI adoption is wide and getting wider. According to the European Commission's SME Report 2025/2026, 55% of large enterprises in the EU used AI in 2025. For small enterprises, that figure was just 17%. Meanwhile, companies across sectors are losing years of accumulated expertise as experienced employees retire. A 2026 Deloitte report found that 92% of surveyed organizations fail to consistently capture knowledge from employees about to leave. For SMEs without dedicated data teams, these problems feed into each other: the knowledge is walking out the door, and the tools to preserve it remain hard to access.
The company has now closed a €7 million Series A round. It was co-led by Ventech, a Paris-based venture capital firm that doubled down on its earlier investment, and NRW.Venture, the venture capital fund of NRW.BANK, the development bank of North Rhine-Westphalia.
In most organizations, useful information lives in dozens of places: file drives, email inboxes, project management tools, CRM platforms, and more. Finding a specific product specification or a customer presentation from last year often means digging through multiple systems, or asking a colleague who happens to remember where it's stored. SMEs feel this more acutely because they typically have fewer IT resources and less standardized infrastructure.
Many companies have tried to address this with generative AI chatbots. The results have been mixed. These tools can only be as good as the data they access, and in most businesses, internal information is fragmented. amber's approach is to organize and contextualize a company's data first, then apply large language models on top of it.
"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 organizations 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."
Nicolas Barthalon, Partner at Ventech
The new capital will fund expansion across Europe, starting in the Benelux region, where amber has already won its first customers. The company also plans to hire and to continue developing its proprietary AI Data Layer, the technology that connects and structures enterprise data before AI models process it. According to amber, this layer helps produce more reliable answers by feeding models structured, relevant context instead of raw, unstructured data.
Longer term, amber wants to move beyond a question-and-answer format. The goal is a system that can recognize what needs to be done inside a company and act on it without being prompted. The company calls this a shift toward autonomous AI.
"amber tackles a specific challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises by making existing knowledge directly accessible and usable. Through our investment, we are supporting a start-up from North Rhine-Westphalia that is addressing a large European market and helping to strengthen the long-term competitiveness of SMEs."
Johanna Antonie Tjaden-Schulte, Member of the Managing Board of NRW.BANK
amber was founded in 2020. Its roots sit in two different worlds: the practical experience of running a family business, and AI research at RWTH Aachen University. CEO Philipp Reißel, CRO Bastian Maiworm, and CTO Igli Manaj had been working on AI technologies since 2018, initially focusing on structuring and connecting internal business data. By the time generative AI took off, they already had a data foundation in place. Today the company employs more than 50 people across offices in Aachen, Cologne, and Tirana.
The platform connects to more than 120 data sources, including Microsoft SharePoint, Google Drive, Jira, Salesforce, email systems, and network drives. Companies do not need to migrate data or set up separate permissions. Employees ask questions in plain language and get answers from across the company's knowledge, with sources cited. amber also offers AI agents for automating repetitive tasks and a project feature where teams collaborate with AI in a shared workspace. Customers include Scheidt & Bachmann, Ritter Sport, Zentis, and Dalli, spanning manufacturing, engineering, IT consulting, and consumer goods.
"AI's next evolution is not another chatbot. The future belongs to systems that understand business context, recognize 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."
Philipp Reißel, Co-Founder and CEO of amber
The round was co-led by Ventech, a European venture capital firm headquartered in Paris, and NRW.Venture, the venture capital fund of NRW.BANK, the development bank of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Ventech was amber's first institutional investor, having backed the company in an earlier round roughly 18 months ago. NRW.BANK's involvement reflects its mandate to support startups in the region.
All of amber's data processing takes place on servers in Germany and the EU, and the platform is GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001-certified.
"AI can only create lasting value when it truly understands how businesses operate. amber has built a strong technological foundation that combines deep enterprise knowledge with autonomous AI capabilities. We look forward to supporting the company's next phase of growth."
Patrick Nesseler, Investment Manager at NRW.BANK
