AdTech

Solid Labs: Ex-Meister CCO Patrick Prokesch Launches AI Engine for Video Ads in Berlin

co-produced by AI05. November 2026, 08:42

Solid Labs founders Christoph Schütte (left) and Patrick Prokesch © Solid Labs

Anyone who has negotiated exits in Austria knows how to win over investors; now Patrick Prokesch has to prove he can win over advertisers too.

The Klagenfurt native is no stranger to the Austrian startup scene: after studying at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, he worked for tech M&A advisory i5invest in Vienna and San Francisco on a series of multimillion exits, including the sale of Viennese startup Kaleido to Canva. In late 2021 he joined Vienna software scale-up Meister (MindMeister, MeisterTask) as Chief Commercial Officer, having previously helped shape its 44 million euro round with Verdane as an advisor. Now the 37-year-old is stepping onto the stage as a founder for the first time: his Berlin startup Solid Labs is opening its platform to all brands and agencies this Thursday after more than a year in stealth mode.

What Solid Does

Solid sees itself neither as an editing tool nor as yet another AI video generator, but as an “AI Creative Engine” for performance marketing. The problem the founders want to solve is known in the industry as creative fatigue: because short-form videos on TikTok and Instagram are consumed at breakneck speed, ads often lose their impact after just days, and according to Solid, around 90 percent of video ads never perform in the first place. Brands therefore need a constant supply of variants, and that is exactly what the Solid Agent is meant to deliver. It breaks a brand’s existing video footage down into individual scenes, understands what is happening in them, and builds finished ads for Meta, TikTok and YouTube in a single conversation: script, voiceover, scene selection, editing, plus variants with new hooks, in other formats and languages. The system learns a brand’s tone and rules in the so-called Brand Hub, and manual edits to script, voice and video remain possible.

The difference from Sora, Veo and the like lies in the source material: Solid deliberately relies on real people, products and places, because ads with real footage come across as more credible than purely AI-generated content. “Any model can generate a video. What a brand needs is a system that knows it: its footage, its voice, its best ads,” says co-founder and CTO Christoph Schütte, a physicist and former engineering lead at Google. The two founders’ vision: growth teams should in future need only a smartphone and Solid to produce their ads.

Customers, Numbers and Angels

That the market launch comes right before Black Friday and the holiday season is no coincidence; some consumer brands make up to 40 percent of their annual revenue in the fourth quarter. In its year with selected customers, Solid says it has already produced video ads for media budgets in the millions, across DACH, Benelux, the UK and the US. Beverage brand HOLY produces four times faster than before and takes campaigns live in new markets within 24 hours, Too Good To Go lets its country teams localize ads themselves in 21 markets and beats external agencies on cost per first purchase, and fitness provider TEVEO created over 200 final videos in a week from a single shoot. Ahead and the Dr. Wolff Group (Alpecin) are also among the customers.

All of this is financed by a previously undisclosed seven-figure pre-seed round closed in 2025 and led by Lucid Capital. The list of business angels reads like a who’s who of the DACH scene: OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger (now at OpenAI), Yepoda serial founder Roman Kirsch, Epidemic Sound co-founder Tom Höglund, and founders and executives from HOLY, Parloa and Too Good To Go. As a next step, Solid wants to close the loop between production and performance: the engine is to publish ads directly to Meta, TikTok and YouTube and feed live performance data back into production, so that every new ad builds on what is working right now.

The Platforms Are Building the Same Thing

The biggest competition is not in Berlin but at the ad platforms themselves. Meta has announced plans to fully automate ad creation with AI by the end of 2026, from image to video to targeting, directly in its own tools and free of charge for advertisers. Google is heading in the same direction with Veo and its asset generators in Performance Max, and TikTok has its own AI creative suite in Symphony. Then there are dozens of startups from Creatify to Arcads to AdCreative.ai that generate video ads with AI avatars or from product pages. Solid’s bet is that brands want a platform-independent engine that knows their own footage, rather than handing their creatives over to the algorithms of Meta and Google, which ultimately optimize mainly for their own ad revenue. Whether that holds up as a standalone business or whether the platforms simply build the feature in is the question that will decide Solid’s fate and that of the entire category. Prokesch knows this question from his time at Meister, where a European productivity tool had to hold its own against Microsoft and Google. This time he is sitting on the other side of the table.