Maex Ament
Co-Founder & CEO
Sessions (2)
Sessions featuring Maex Ament at Bits & Pretzels 2026 | Founders Festival in Munich
Who Owns Europe’s AI Future?
Europe’s AI future, as framed in the opening, depends on whether the region can stop being “a customer of everything” and build enough technical, corporate, and narrative momentum to shape its own outcomes. The video set a deliberately urgent tone: Europe cannot rely on China for equipment, America for compute, and America for military capability while expecting to control its strategic future. It also argued that Europe has ambitious young technical talent and needs stronger stories that give people something to look forward to. The panel was then positioned as a discussion among investors, builders, and storytellers about who owns AI in Europe now and who could own it next. The introductions grounded that question in specific European tech actors. Andreas Klinger was introduced as the former CTO of Product Hunt, founder of PROTOTYPE, and initiator of EU Inc, pushing for a single pan-European company structure. Judith Dada was introduced as German Investor of the Year, a Personio board member, co-CEO of Langdock, and co-author of “Europe 2031,” a scenario about Europe sliding into AI irrelevance. Rana Yared of Balderton was connected to Munich companies including Quantum Systems, while Maex Ament was introduced as a serial European founder now building the AI company Causa Prima. Moderator Mark Bergen opened by asking not who should own Europe’s AI future, but who owns AI in Europe today. Judith answered by separating the “realistic” and “aspirational” answers. Realistically, too much control over compute, chips, and models sits with the US and China. Aspirationally, she argued that the European Union is the world’s second largest economy and is built on transformational companies that have endured for long periods. In her view, Europe’s AI future will be owned by companies that successfully transform their businesses for the new age and carry their value creation forward into European GDP. Maex agreed that Europe has lost ground in frontier models, hardware, and data centers, but saw a large opportunity in the application layer, especially enterprise software and enterprise adoption. Andreas sharply challenged that view, saying the application layer is highly overrated because foundational model companies may generate the next wave of teams in science, medicine, material science, and other industries. Rana reframed the frontier-lab debate: rather than copying generalist US labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI, she argued Europe’s edge may lie in specific foundational models for sectors where Europe already leads, including industrial AI, robotics, healthcare, material science, and chemistry. The supplied transcript ends while the panel is still exploring that distinction between applications, generalist frontier labs, and sector-specific foundational AI.
Next-Gen Enterprise & ERP
The core message of the available session transcript is that ERP is not merely back-office accounting software, but the operating system through which enterprises run production, finance, supply chain, fulfillment, and cross-company coordination. The panel brought together three different angles on this shift: JP from Conduct, building an AI platform for enterprise IT teams that operate and customize ERP layers; Maex from Causa Prima, building a B2B agent network for mundane intercompany workflows such as sending and receiving invoices; and Domenico from Xentral, building an ERP layer for fast-growing SMBs that reduces operational complexity across sales orchestration, fulfillment, warehousing, and related workflows. The moderator framed the discussion around what is broken in ERP, how enterprise software is evolving, and what founders can learn about selling into enterprise and SMB markets. JP’s central argument was that the biggest issue in large-enterprise ERP is not that the underlying systems are inherently bad. He argued that systems such as SAP are deeply embedded and fit for purpose, powering more than 85% of global commerce, but that the friction comes from how slowly enterprises can operate, modify, and extend them. He illustrated this with a Palantir-era example involving a defense company near Munich that needed to ramp up tank production for Ukraine. The company’s inability to quickly reflect new production lines, conveyor belts, and supply-chain configurations in its SAP/MES software stack meant production growth could be delayed by the complexity of changing the system. Conduct’s stated value proposition is to accelerate enterprise IT teams and consultants so new ERP-related features can reach production faster and transformation can happen at a pace closer to business needs. Maex agreed that legacy ERP systems are difficult to collaborate with, especially when building applications on top of them, but emphasized that incumbents such as SAP also occupy a powerful distribution position because so many transactions and Fortune 500 companies touch SAP systems. For Causa Prima, which wants to finance invoices after automating the noisy work between companies, the invoice’s presence inside SAP is exactly where value can be unlocked. His main open question was whether SAP will become open enough for agentic partnerships and external solutions, comparing this to Salesforce’s stated openness around agentic partnerships. He also suggested similar issues exist across other major platforms, briefly referencing Workday as a company “somewhere in the middle.” Domenico described the ERP problem from the SMB and operator perspective. He said Xentral emerged because ERP implementations historically took years, cost millions of euros, and often failed to deliver on sales-process promises. For smaller companies with ten, twenty, or fifty employees, he argued the issue is less about heavy customization and more about the time wasted translating business intentions into forms, masks, manual data entry, and actionable system inputs. He also criticized ERP as a silo product and argued that more intelligence will come from tapping information across ERP, inventory management, support, CRM, and other systems. The available transcript ends as Maex connects that integrative data layer to the coming agentic wave, stressing that agents need context from ERP, Slack, Teams, warehouse systems, and other sources to be useful.