I have mainly been seeing AI and defense companies in the German tech market. Not the kind of companies we need.

It would be nice to see more worker owned startups. I guess that's too much to ask though.

Germany quietly setting startup records while everyone keeps insisting Europe can’t innovate is pretty funny. The real test comes next though: founding 3,000 companies is great, but if the successful ones still need to move to the US to raise serious growth capital, Germany has only solved half the problem.

Artificial intelligence is the key driver of the boom: 1,038 of the newly founded startups have a clear AI focus—more than one in three—and thus more than in all of 2025. The software sector remains by far the strongest industry, with 844 new startups. But the boom is also evident in other fields: Medicine (274) and the food sector (181) are among the sectors with the highest number of new startups—AI applications and related technological advances are also key drivers of development here.

I wonder if the "fake it (with AI) until you make it" will have similar or worse success rate than before AI. Startups sure didn't wait for AI to produce bullshit.

Measuring the number of new startup's as a success factor is IMHO very stupid. I once started a startup. Starting a startup is not that difficult. Keep that startup running past the five year mark, then you may start to talk about success...

The amount of nihilistic, anti-German views (which are even mostly unrelated to the topic) is very telling imo. And more so as the views come in parts from accounts that post almost exclusively comments seeking to criticize Europe while hailing China and Russia if I may say so.

How many of those startup's are one person delivery contract firms, exclusively working for Amazon?

Verena Pausder comments: “To create global champions ‘Made in Europe,’ we need a strong European capital market.

She should start a startup to fund startups.

Though the easiest way would be to overvalue a company, e.g. an electric car company, which allows its investors to borrow against the shares and invest that money in new startups.

Unfortunately, Europe doesn't make it easy to borrow against shares yet. /s

Yeah but most of these startups were founded because people fear for their job and want a redundancy...

This is NOT good news. It is actually bad news.

A lot of these startups are founded by people who have recently been fired or otherwise made redundant. The survivability of these companies is questionable.

Additionally there are on going issues that the relatively quick process of starting up a company is used by organised crime in money laundering (e.g. Chinese Prato based structures) - there are estimates that these use thousands of shell companies that vanish after months

Just looking at the number of startups is a very very bad metric. Much more interesting would be:

• Gross revenue in the first year

• Average employees per Startup (a lot of these are single employee companies)

• Reported profit per company after one year

• Lifetime of startup companies

I am afraid a lot of these metrics will be really really bad looking.

Despite what people think founding a company is easy in Germany. You can do found a limited liability company with basically only the notary costs+1€. I had mine started in a week at the beginning of Covid. Getting a notary appointment is the hardest and most expensive part and that is only necessary for a limited liability company. Otherwise? Generate a few documents and send them in. You can do that electronically these days if you can sign via eIDAS.

No issues.

Bureaucracy comes later.

The German mandatory old age insurance comes to check in. Oh...you are building a new company, are the only employee or have very little employees and only have two clients so far? Yeah fuck you that's dependent employment and you are not a actual company. They can even decide in one year it's not and then come back next year and decide differently.

The workers comp deciding seemingly randomly when they come to check you actually do things the way they want.

The tax office is a different matter as well. (Mine is actually somewhat cooperative and nice. Other's aren't)

And don't get me started on the sheer lack of competence in the German banking system. I operate outside Germany as well and the difference is staggering.I happily let someone pull a teeth out of my jaw without anaesthesia or deal with the tax office every day if I could avoid those. With my Italian and Swiss banks? No issues.

Source: Founder - 6 years ago. Still hating it. Worst and best decision of my life.