Niels Doerje
Founding Partner
Sessions (6)
Sessions featuring Niels Doerje at Bits & Pretzels 2026 | Founders Festival in Munich
START WITH THE EXIT: WHAT YOUR FUTURE SELF WISHES YOU KNEW TODAY
The core message of the session was that founders should “begin with the end in mind”: not by building a company only for an exit, but by making early decisions that will not block a good exit later. The moderator framed the discussion around a practical founder question: what would change today if you already knew how your company ends? Niels Doerje and Julian Riedlbauer positioned the session as a backward-looking exercise from exit, through boardroom and fundraising, back to the founding phase. Julian brought experience from entrepreneurship and more than 80 advised tech transactions since 2008, while Niels spoke from the founder, board member, adviser, and chairpeople perspective. Julian emphasized that most founders sell a company only once, even if they spend many years building product, customers, and market position. Because an acquirer can appear unexpectedly, founders should stay “somewhat exit ready” rather than waiting until a buyer calls. He described exit readiness across three dimensions: operating quality, strategic alignment, and technical housekeeping. Operationally, companies should focus on customers, product, KPIs, tech stack, and building a great business rather than shaping everything around a sale. Strategically, they should understand growth plans, road maps, and how the company could fit with future buyers, including the possibility that strong business partners become the best bidders because they already trust the team and understand synergies. The session then detailed what buyers scrutinize in due diligence and valuation. Julian warned that reporting, annual accounts, tax filings, legal documentation, software documentation, share transfers, capital increases, and IP ownership can all create problems if not clearly documented. He explained that strategic buyers consider not only the standalone company but also synergies, while sophisticated acquirers benchmark companies against many others on metrics such as Rule of 40 performance, revenue retention, cash EBITDA, scalability, technology, customer concentration, and whether an AI product is truly AI native. He also noted that buyers are risk averse: not buying is often safer for a corporate manager than buying a company that later fails. The discussion also compared valuation dynamics in AI-native companies and slower-growing enterprise software. Julian said very fast-growing AI-native companies can command valuations of 30x to 50x ARR when growing 3x, 5x, or 10x year on year, while slower-growing enterprise software valuations have dropped after public-market resets affecting companies such as SAP, Salesforce, and Workday. The Flight Keys case study illustrated why governance and shareholder alignment matter early: with seven founders, one early-stage VC, and no later rounds, two founders wanted to sell after eight to ten years while five did not. Because no clear sale-trigger agreement existed, the process nearly created a stakeholder conflict, even though more than 10 offers were received and Inside Partners ultimately became the buyer everyone accepted.
Welcome
The opening message of the session was that the CIO AI Summit at Bits and Pretzels is designed to connect corporate decision makers with startup innovation, turning the festival’s founder-and-investor network into a demand-driven opportunity for customers and startups. Bernd Storm welcomed attendees to the third CIO AI Summit, introduced himself as co-founder and managing director of Bits and Pretzels, and explained that after twelve years focused on bringing “the best founders and the best investors” together, the event now also aims to provide customers for founders. He framed customers as “the best investors for all the startups” and pointed to the benefit of placing CIOs in the same venue as 7,500 founders and investors, where they can exchange best practices and visit the startup exhibition to find companies that may help improve their businesses, processes, and products. Storm thanked co-host Niels Doerje, Yassine, Minister Mehring, and the sponsors led by SAP, then encouraged the audience to engage with colleagues in the room and founders outside. Niels Doerje then introduced the day’s format: more than 35 speakers, eight handpicked moderators, and a mix of fireside chats, panels, keynotes, and best-practice sessions. He emphasized making the program more interactive than the previous year by involving the audience through questions and conversation, before introducing Bavarian State Minister of Digital Affairs Fabian Mehring as the first speaker. Mehring welcomed the CIOs, decision makers, fellow ministers, and partners, presenting Bavaria as “the height of high-tech,” “the heart of our tech ecosystem,” and “one of the digital powerhouses of Europe.” He thanked the Bits and Pretzels team for “rolling out the red carpet for the future” and for bringing bright minds from around the world to Munich. He then thanked the decision makers in the audience, saying Bavaria’s progress toward becoming a leading hub for future technologies was not the result of political speeches but of their daily work and decisions. He cited the tech ecosystem index worldwide, investment in future technologies and startups in Bavaria, the Financial Times’ evaluation of leading European tech ecosystems, and investments by companies including Microsoft, AWS, Apple, SAP, and Schwarz Group as signs that Bavaria’s vision is becoming reality. Mehring closed by stressing that success creates responsibility and named issues requiring joint discussion: deregulation, venture capital, digital sovereignty, and answers to warnings from AI developers about technology risks. Christina Sinemus, Minister for Digitalization and Innovation in Hesse, then announced a next-year initiative tied to Bits and Pretzels: roundtables, potentially as a roadshow across Germany and Europe, bringing digitalization ministers, startups, techies, and others together. The goal is to discuss how Europe can increase innovation and venture capital and reduce administrative processes, with European values and technical innovation positioned as assets for digital transformation.
Welcome: CIO meet Founders
The core message of this short welcome segment is that the upcoming program is designed to connect CIOs with startups, specifically by creating a setting where both groups can meet around AI-focused industrial innovation. The hosts reopen the collaboration stage after a break, welcome the audience back to the second part of the summit, and quickly frame what is about to happen: three startups will pitch first, followed by a look into startup programs run by three corporates. The value proposition stated in the session is narrow and direct: the format is “built to bring the CIOs together with the startups.” The session begins with brief check-ins and repeated welcomes, setting a positive but informal tone. The hosts refer to the “Bits and Bredsratieabbau AI summit” and the “collaboration stage,” then explain the structure of the immediate next block. The first substantive agenda item is that “the three hottest startups” will pitch. The transcript does not provide the names of those startups, their products, their industries beyond the later phrase “AI industrial startups,” or any detail on what they will present. It only establishes that startup pitches are next in the sequence. Before starting, the hosts pause for logistics. They ask for the QR code and remind attendees that, if they have not registered for “Oktoberfest, the CIO summit,” they can still do so because some spots remain available. This is the only concrete audience action requested during the welcome. After that reminder, the hosts confirm they are ready to begin and return to the purpose of the session: building a bridge between CIOs and startups. They also acknowledge that more people may still be arriving, but decide not to delay the program. The segment concludes by kicking off the next portion with “three great AI industrial startups.” No claims are made about the startups’ performance, technologies, funding, customers, or future impact. The welcome functions as a concise transition into a startup-focused program block, combining stage-setting, registration logistics, and a clear articulation of the intended audience connection: CIOs on one side, startups on the other, and the session positioned as a bridge between those two worlds.
This is how Europe´s top AI Scale-ups win Enterprise: Certivity, Blockbrain, Allsides.
The session’s core message was that European AI scale-ups are winning enterprise customers by solving highly specific operational problems with infrastructure-grade products: ALLSIDES focuses on physically grounded 3D data for physical AI and world models, while Blockbrain focuses on sovereign enterprise AI agents that turn company knowledge into scalable workflows. The available transcript opens with Franz Tschimben presenting ALLSIDES from Brixen, Italy, as a computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics company building “three d infrastructure” for markets where AI must understand physical objects rather than merely generate plausible images or text. ALLSIDES’ value proposition is mass production of high-quality 3D data for real-world objects such as tools, toys, household items, fruits, industrial parts, sporting goods, and consumer products. Tschimben emphasized that its scanner can convert an object into a high-quality, physically grounded 3D model in about five minutes, capturing not only visual geometry but also properties such as measured materials, mass, friction coefficients, colliders, and eventually physics. He positioned this as critical for content creation, physical AI, world models, and generative 3D. In product imagery, AI may hallucinate environments or people, but enterprise customers such as Adidas and Nike need the product itself to remain high fidelity and measured. The company said it is already in full rollouts with customers, has around 50 people across Italy and New York, and works with research partners including NVIDIA, the Technical University of Munich, and Heidelberg University. The ALLSIDES pitch then moved from asset capture into simulation and robot training. Tschimben explained the “real to sim, sim to real” pipeline and the sim-to-real gap: robotics demos often work in simulation but crack in reality. ALLSIDES aims to reduce that gap by producing scarce physical 3D data that cannot simply be scraped from the internet in the way language, image, or video data often can. The company described a 3D data factory in Bressanone scanning sixteen hours a day, six days a week, and announced a San Francisco “real to sim to real factory” with NVIDIA, Industrial Next, and academic partners, using scanners and robots to demonstrate assembly use cases such as server racks and car parts. Blockbrain followed with Antonius “Tony” Gress positioning the company as a sovereign enterprise AI platform built from Baden-Württemberg for Europe. He argued that Europe’s remaining controllable competitive lever is expert knowledge, especially as Germany faces high energy costs, high labor costs, bureaucracy, taxes, and demographic pressure. Blockbrain’s “brain” turns knowledge hidden in data silos and experts’ heads into institutional memory, connecting to systems such as CRM, SAP, PLM, Google, and Microsoft suites. Its “block” side provides Lego-like building blocks for company GPTs, bots, agents, workflows, always-on agents, and apps. Gress stressed sovereign deployment options, including European servers, European infrastructure, open-source weight models, on-premise and air-gapped deployments, and a close partnership with Schwarz Group’s IT cloud. The provided transcript ends during Blockbrain’s platform architecture discussion and does not include substantive Certivity content.
Anthropic, Siemens and SAP: Don't miss THE 3 top curated start-up collaboration programs.
The core message of the provided transcript is that startups can get far more value from corporate collaboration programs when they approach them with a specific goal, a clear understanding of the corporate’s business units and customers, and a technology-focused explanation rather than a buzzword-heavy pitch. Danijel Grabovac opened the Siemens segment by acknowledging that startup events often do not want “corporate” talk, then framed his presentation as a practical, “no bullshit” guide to working with corporates. He distinguished between venture capital, venture clienting and venture partnering: corporates may invest, buy startup solutions as first or early customers, or help startups sell jointly to the corporate’s own customer base. His central point was that knowing which of these paths a startup wants changes the entire conversation and helps the corporate route the startup to the right “happy home.” Siemens illustrated this with concrete examples. Tendet had developed GPS-like location devices for offshore safety, but Siemens identified a rail-track safety use case where workers could avoid physical barriers while receiving warnings if they moved even a centimeter too far; if they remained in a dangerous zone, the train would not receive a green signal. Grabovac used this to argue that founders should describe their technological know-how rather than default to fashionable terms like “AI agents,” because a corporate may discover a different product-market-fit path than the startup originally imagined. He then described Siemens for Startups as a funnel for finding the “needle in the haystack,” whether startups approach at events or via siemens.com/startup, and warned against sending generic investor decks when the actual goal is commercial collaboration. The Siemens section also highlighted the value of discounted or free access to enterprise-grade tools for venture-backed startups. Grabovac cited JetZero, which Siemens supported early with software licenses and attention, as an example of how aerospace startups can access tools once reserved for incumbents. He connected this to digital twin design, explaining how factories, planes and processes can be modeled before construction. The final Siemens example was Rechu, which scanned an existing factory with a backpack, returned point-cloud segmentation within two days, and enabled import into a digital twin. The speaker concluded that the stronger business case often lies not in merely selling to Siemens, but in building on Siemens technology and selling together to Siemens customers. The transcript then transitions to SAP. The host introduces Jan Gutknecht as a bridge between a large corporate and the startup world, and Gutknecht begins by connecting SAP for Startups to the idea that enterprise solutions should be ready for startups. He outlines three collaboration pillars and starts with strategic investments and acquisitions, mentioning recent investments and acquisitions such as WalkMe and Signavio before the supplied transcript cuts off. Anthropic is named in the session introduction as one of the three programs, but no substantive Anthropic segment is included in the provided transcript.
The Art of the deal
Matthias Schranner’s core message was that difficult negotiations have changed: in the environments he advises on, including business, politics, and peace negotiations, negotiators should stop relying on shared values and persuasive arguments and instead prepare clear demands around interests and risk. Introduced as a former police-trained hostage negotiator who now advises the UN, governments, and global corporations through the Schranner Negotiation Institute, he framed the session around how startups can negotiate with larger corporates and how corporates should prepare when startups understand the negotiation game. He argued that negotiation is moving from a “value based” approach built around cooperation, partnership, and long-term alignment toward an “interest based” approach. Using the example of negotiations between the USA and Canada under the Trump administration, he said concessions can now be interpreted not as cooperation but as weakness, which may invite more pressure. For Schranner, the practical implication is that negotiators should not try to prove they are right or persuade the other side with arguments. In his view, arguments often signal that the other party is wrong, which triggers counterarguments rather than agreement. Schranner contrasted two negotiation philosophies: starting with “low hanging fruit” versus putting “the fish on the table.” He recommended naming what you want early, respectfully and clearly, rather than hiding the difficult issue until later. He also emphasized that future negotiations in the CIO and corporate environment are not mainly about price or money, but about risk: managing risk, sharing risk, and negotiating risk. The first demand, he said, should clarify what the negotiator wants from a risk perspective. In the interview with Niels, Schranner identified three recurring mistakes: committing too early before all information is available, trying to convince the other side, and arriving with only one demand so there is nothing left to trade at the end. His practical rules for founders included never negotiating with yourself, avoiding guessing games about what the other party might accept, and not assuming the larger corporation automatically has all the power. If a big company is in the room, he said, it wants something too. When faced with pressure such as a 30% discount demand, he advised not saying yes or no immediately, but using responses such as “difficult,” “interesting,” or “noted” to keep the negotiation open while gathering information.