Munich-based startup Zeit AI has raised €4.3 million ($5 million) in a new funding round. The company is building an autonomous data engineer designed to help businesses across Europe manage and work with their data more easily.
The funding round includes several well-known investors. These include Y Combinator, the University of Oxford’s Seed Fund, the Sequoia Capital Scout Fund, ACE Ventures, and Hasso Plattner VC, the investment fund of SAP founder Hasso Plattner.
The round also received investment from several prominent angel investors. They include former German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, World Cup winner Mario Götze, Meta board member Charlie Songhurst, Martin Schoeller of Schoeller Group, and Helsing CTO Robert Fink.
Zeit AI is focused on developing technology that can work like an autonomous data engineer. Its goal is to help European companies handle data-related tasks with less manual work and reduce the need for highly specialized data engineering resources.
“Europe’s industrial base cannot outsource the decisions that run it. Zeit AI is one of the few companies making sovereign infrastructure the default rather than the compromise,” said Jens Schmidt-Sceery, Partner at Hasso Plattner VC.
Zeit AI was founded in 2024 by Leopold von Waldthausen and Marvin Bornstein, both of whom previously worked at Palantir. The company is building an autonomous data engineer for mid-sized businesses in Europe.
Its product, ZeitMind, connects data from ERP, CRM, and more than 600 other systems. An AI agent then uses this data to create applications that are ready for analysis and reporting.
ZeitMind allows businesses to trace data back to the individual transaction, helping them understand where information comes from. The platform also operates from data centres in Germany.
Zeit AI says many mid-sized European companies have plenty of data but struggle to use it effectively. When their ERP or financial planning systems cannot handle a task, employees often turn to Excel as a workaround. According to the company, these manual processes can take around 10 days every month and often continue for years.
