For many mid sized companies, the problem is not a lack of data but the difficulty of turning scattered business information into decisions. Munich based AI startup Zeit AI is targeting that gap with a €5 million funding round to expand ZeitMind, an autonomous data engineering platform designed to connect fragmented systems, clean information and turn business questions into working applications.
The round includes backing from Y Combinator, the University of Oxford’s Seed Fund, Sequoia Capital Scout Fund, ACE Ventures and Hasso Plattner VC, alongside angel investors including Christian Lindner, Mario Götze, Charlie Songhurst, Martin Schoeller and Helsing CTO Robert Fink.
Founded in 2024 by former Palantir employees Leopold von Waldthausen and Marvin Bornstein, Zeit AI joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch. The founders say their experience working with large industrial businesses showed them how much time companies still spend moving information manually between disconnected systems.
Building an Autonomous Data Engineer
At the centre of Zeit AI’s offering is ZeitMind, which the company describes as an autonomous data engineer for the European mid market.
The platform connects SAP, enterprise resource planning systems, customer relationship management platforms, human resources information systems and more than 600 other source systems. It then prepares and organises data before turning natural language requests into dashboards, reports and operational applications.
The approach is aimed at companies that may have established ERP and financial planning systems but still depend heavily on spreadsheets when they need specialised analysis or reporting. Traditionally, building the infrastructure required for such work can involve data engineers, analysts and developers.
Zeit AI wants ZeitMind to perform much of that work through software.
From Raw Data to Applications
ZeitMind is designed to go beyond simply answering questions about company data. Its platform can integrate information from different systems, build custom applications and support ongoing business workflows.
For example, companies can combine financial information from SAP with CRM pipeline data to track revenue and costs in one place. They can also build applications for areas such as supplier performance, inventory management and financial controlling without requiring conventional software development.
The company says its applications can provide drill downs from high level business metrics to underlying transactions. This traceability is intended to help businesses understand not only what is happening but also the data behind each result.
Designed for Business Users
A major part of Zeit AI’s proposition is reducing the dependence on specialised technical teams for everyday data work.
The platform allows business users to interact with data using natural language. Zeit AI says its implementation process can begin with a specific business question that a team currently answers using spreadsheets or exports. The company then connects the relevant systems and builds an application around the use case.
Recent product development has also focused on allowing ZeitMind’s AI agent to make large numbers of interconnected changes across an application in a single workflow. The company says its branching architecture allows the agent to work through hundreds of steps before a user reviews the resulting changes.
European Data Focus
Data security and European data control are also central to the company’s positioning. Zeit AI says ZeitMind is hosted in Germany, is GDPR compliant and does not use customer data to train models.
The company is building specifically for the European mid market, where businesses often have complex technology environments but may not have the same data engineering resources as large enterprises.
Scaling the Platform
The new €5 million investment will be used to expand Zeit AI’s reach among mid sized businesses and hire additional engineers to support customer deployments.
The startup says it grew from zero to €1 million in annual recurring revenue within 12 months of building ZeitMind.
With its latest funding, Zeit AI is now looking to accelerate that momentum by making autonomous data engineering accessible to a much broader group of European businesses, turning fragmented operational data into applications that can support faster and more informed decisions.
