amber: AI Startup For SMEs Raises €7 Million

Aachen-based AI startup amber has closed a €7 million Series A. NRW.Venture, the VC fund of NRW.BANK, led the round, while existing investor Ventech increased its stake. The company is keeping its valuation, individual ticket sizes and revenue numbers private.

This is amber’s third known financing. The company started in 2021 under the name ambeRoad with a pre-seed round from five business angels. In March 2025, it followed up with a €2.1 million seed round led by Ventech. Back then, the team said it had around 30 people across Aachen and Cologne. Since then, it has also added a site in Tirana.

The pitch is straightforward, and probably familiar to anyone who has ever tried to find one old file in a company that has grown past the point of sanity. The relevant knowledge is spread across email, drives, cloud storage, ERP and CRM systems, ticketing tools and project folders. amber’s “AI Data Layer” is meant to connect and structure that material before a language model gets involved. The company says that keeps access rights intact, preserves know-how when employees leave and lets new hires find context without playing twenty questions with the office veteran.

The bigger move is what amber wants to do next with the money: shift from a user-driven assistant to autonomous software that spots tasks and executes them across enterprise systems. Co-founder and CRO Bastian Maiworm says most AI tools still wait for the right prompt, while co-founder and CEO Philipp Reißel says the next stage is not another chatbot. amber is already 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 last funding round, the company said it had more than 200 mid-sized customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but it is not giving an updated count now.

NRW.Venture and Ventech are clearly betting on the less glamorous part of AI: data plumbing, access rights and workflow integration. That is usually where the real value hides, even if it doesn’t make for flashy demo videos. The startup’s first expansion target is the Benelux region, and it also plans deeper integration into enterprise systems and a bigger team.