A German startup is betting that European enterprises want workplace AI without American oversight, and it now has state-backed capital to prove the point.
amber, founded in 2021 by three RWTH Aachen University alumni, has collected €7 million in a Series A co-led by Ventech and NRW.Venture, the venture arm of development bank NRW.BANK. Co-founder Philipp Reissel worked on transformer technology before it powered today’s large language models.
Its platform layers search, chat and agent tools over a data layer that organizes documents, presentations and records from customer and resource planning systems before models touch them. That preparation can cut AI token costs by up to 60%, and customers include engineering and construction firms mining years of past project records.
Where amber differentiates from rivals like Glean and Microsoft Copilot is sovereignty. The company runs on a German cloud, counts no American shareholders and is not subject to the US Cloud Act, which lets US authorities demand data from American firms wherever it is stored. “What’s happening at amber is decided by European minds,” Maiworm said.
Reissel describes the ambition as a helper with the context of a best coworker, one that answers questions and takes actions inside company systems.
