amber: AI Startup For SMEs Raises €7 Million

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Aachen-based AI company amber has closed a Series A funding round of €7 million. NRW.Venture, the VC fund of NRW.BANK, is acting as lead investor; existing investor Ventech, which had led the seed round, says it has significantly expanded its investment. The company does not disclose its valuation, the size of individual investors’ stakes, or any revenue figures.

It is the third known financing for the startup. In 2021, the team — then still operating under the name ambeRoad — raised a pre-seed investment from five business angels, followed in March 2025 by a €2.1 million seed round led by Ventech. At the time, around 30 people worked at the Aachen and Cologne offices; a site in Tirana has since been added.

What the AI actually does for SMEs

amber’s starting point is a very practical problem: in most mid-sized companies, the relevant knowledge is not stored in one place but scattered across email inboxes, network drives, cloud storage, ERP and CRM systems, ticketing tools and project folders. Anyone looking for the current product specification, an old customer presentation or the documentation of a project from three years ago either clicks through folder structures or asks a colleague who has been around longer. When that colleague retires, the knowledge is effectively gone.

A language model alone does not solve this, because it lacks both access to and an understanding of these scattered company files. This is where amber’s so-called “AI Data Layer” comes in — a layer that connects, links, structures and contextualises data from the various systems before a large language model is brought into play at all.

For employees at an SME, this looks like the following in daily practice:

• Asking instead of searching: Instead of combing through drives, you put the question directly to amber and get an answer based on internal documents — respecting existing access rights, as the company stresses.
• Knowledge retention: Experience-based knowledge that would otherwise sit with individuals remains available even after those people leave.
• Faster onboarding: New employees can work out context themselves rather than getting up to speed through constant questions.
• More efficient model usage: Because the language models work with pre-structured, relevant information instead of large volumes of unstructured data, amber says computing overhead drops — and answers become more precise.

The next step the company wants to take with the fresh capital is the leap from a user-driven assistant to autonomous software: AI that does not wait for the right question but recognises which tasks are pending and executes them itself across different enterprise systems. “Most AI applications today are still waiting for users to ask the right questions,” says co-founder and CRO Bastian Maiworm. The vision goes considerably further, he argues: a platform that understands what is happening inside a company and actively takes work off employees’ hands.

Co-founder and CEO Philipp Reißel puts it this way: “The next stage of AI is not another chatbot.”

Customers from industry and consumer goods

According to the company, its platform is currently used by firms in manufacturing, engineering, IT consulting and consumer goods, including Scheidt & Bachmann, Ritter Sport, Zentis, Schüßler-Plan, Dalli and Hailo. At the time of the 2025 seed round, the startup spoke of more than 200 mid-sized customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; amber does not provide an updated customer figure.

The company was founded in 2021 by RWTH Aachen graduates Philipp Reißel, Bastian Maiworm and Igli Manaj. Its architectural approach — data quality and company context first, generative AI second — differs fundamentally from that of many “AI-first” providers, the team argues.

What the investors say

Ventech partner Nicolas Barthalon, who has backed amber since the seed round, points to the technological foundation: the team recognised early on what matters when deploying AI in companies — preserving data sovereignty and helping businesses identify the right AI agents and workflows and scale them across the organisation.

For NRW.Venture, the investment also has a structural policy dimension. Johanna Antonie Tjaden-Schulte, member of the managing board of NRW.BANK, frames it in terms of the competitiveness of the Mittelstand: from North Rhine-Westphalia, amber is addressing a large European market. Patrick Nesseler, Investment Manager at NRW.BANK, stresses that the value of AI depends decisively on whether company data is available in the right context.

Expansion will begin in the Benelux region. In parallel, amber plans to deepen integration into existing enterprise systems and grow the team.