# 99 - A Conversation with Adrian Locher, Co-Founder and General Partner of Merantix Capital

# 100 - Five Years of Building - Special episode with Three Amazing Founders,

This is our 100th episode — and we are not celebrating with a retrospective. We are celebrating with three founders who came back to tell us what actually happened. Flora Geske [https://www.linkedin.com/in/flora-geske/?locale=en]co-founded SUMM-AI [https://summ-ai.com/en/], a GovTech company using AI to make public administration more accessible and efficient, and winner of the TUM Presidential Award. Pablo Palafox [https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablorpalafox/] co-founded HappyRobot [https://www.happyrobot.ai/], a Y Combinator-backed agentic AI platform for logistics that has raised $44 million and counts the world's biggest freight brokers among its customers. Kevin Berghoff [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-berghoff/] co-founded Quantum Diamonds [https://www.qd-st.com/], a TUM spin-out that has just raised €152 million and deployed its quantum sensing systems in the US, with nine of the world's top ten chipmakers already engaged. Three very different sectors. One starting point: Munich, TUM, five years ago. Join us as we look back at five years of building — and forward at what comes next.

# 99 - A Conversation with Adrian Locher, Co-Founder and General Partner of Merantix Capital

Adrian Locher [https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianlocher/] co-founded Merantix Capital [https://www.merantix-capital.com/]in Berlin in 2016 with machine-learning researcher Rasmus Rothe [https://www.linkedin.com/in/rasmusrothe/]. What started as an AI studio has become one of Europe's most distinctive AI organisations: a venture studio that incubates companies from scratch, a campus hosting an entire ecosystem, and — as of June 2026 — a €100 million plus fund backing AI ventures across the continent. In this conversation, Adrian traces his path from founding his first company at fourteen and selling the Swiss flash-sale platform DeinDeal to Ringier in 2012, to building Merantix's combined studio-fund-campus model. We discuss what it actually means to build AI-native companies in Europe, where the structural obstacles remain, how to evaluate teams when technology moves faster than any due diligence, and what a thriving European AI ecosystem could look like by 2031.

# 98 - Tech at War: Lessons from Ukraine for the Next Generation of Defense Entrepreneurs — with Dimko Zhluktenko, Soldier, Founder, Entrepreneur

Defense tech is being rewritten in real time — not in labs or conference rooms, but on the frontlines of Ukraine. Join me in my conversation with with Dimko Zhluktenko [https://www.linkedin.com/in/d1mnewz/] — soldier, drone pilot , founder of Dzyga's Paw [https://dzygaspaw.com/] ($6M raised, 70+ countries), analyst at Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment RAID, and now founder of Hasta [https://www.hasta.fund/], a DefTech VC fund. Dimko has lived every dimension of defense tech at once: as a soldier who uses the technology, as a founder who sources and funds it, and as an analyst who extracts lessons from it. What he shares about drone warfare, and what actually matters on the battlefield, his analysis of Ukraine, Europe, ... is something no conference panel can replicate and a must for all defenders of liberty and democracy.

# 97 - 200 new Shopfloor Apps in Six Months — A Conversation with Eden Chabanet and Johannes Mohren of Arctory

Meet Eden Chabanet [https://www.linkedin.com/in/eden-chabanet/] and Johannes Moran [https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannes-mohren-48b82b175/], Co-Founder of Arctory [https://arctory.ai/]. Arctory is a platform for shopfloor vibe coding which, since its inception, has been used in hundreds of applications. Join me as we discuss topics such as the role of vibe coding in demanding professional environments, positioning focused platforms versus generalist ones, the role of IT in a changing world, ... and how a German startups focusing on the mid market is experience significant growth.

# 96 - Meet Simon Wilhelm, CEO & Co-Founder of Scaile and learn how to be visible in the age of Gen AI

Join me in my conversation with Simon Wilhelm [https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-leander-wilhelm/], CEO & Co-Founder of Scaile [https://www.scaile.tech/]. Simon understood that classic SEO techniques no longer works. His startup helps companies get visibility. After a mere 6 months, he has secured 40 plus customers from multiple countries and shares learnings with us.