Munich Startup: What measurable difference does your solution already make today?
Julian Freese, CEO and Co-Founder: The retail and real estate sectors are facing a fundamental transformation: investments no longer automatically generate profits as they once did; every new location and every project now requires meticulous analysis and cost calculation. Municipalities and cities are also under pressure: those who want to prevent gentrification and maintain vibrant, diverse city centers – and not just trendy coffee shops on every corner – need reliable location data as a basis for decision-making. Octoscreen operates precisely within this complex environment.
Expansion and location teams at retailers, project developers, asset managers, and banks still spend vast amounts of their time manually sifting through thousands of council information systems, official gazettes, and municipal portals in search of location information that makes a crucial difference: What construction projects are in the planning stages? What developments will affect foot traffic, building regulations, or competition? What opportunities and risks are hidden in municipal sources that no one can currently fully survey?
This is exactly where we begin we To: We monitor over 35,000 sources daily – municipal documents, zoning plans, competitor activities, demographic changes – and condense this data into decisions that our clients previously could not make at all or only after months of delay. The numbers speak for themselves: 95 percent time savings compared to manual work, three times more cost-efficient, five times more accurate, and changes are detected up to three months earlier. Specifically: Companies like Edeka, dm-drogerie markt, Norma, Gpep, Ratisbona, and NKD use Octoscreen to inform expansion decisions, location assessments and analyses, and real-time competitor monitoring. Where previously an expert opinion took several weeks and a team was tied up several days a week with pure research, our platform delivers the answer in minutes – seamlessly, transparently, and not as a static PDF, but as a continuous early warning system.
Intelligence layer instead of individual reports
Munich Startup: Why are you faster, better, or bolder than established providers?
Julian Freese: The established players sell data. We sell decisions. One important reason for this: We don't come from the real estate industry and therefore look at our clients' problems from a completely different perspective. Where traditional providers deliver tables, maps, and reports and leave the interpretation to the client, we have a true Intelligence Layer Built: a layer that not only shows what happens, but also why it happens and what the consequences are. Furthermore, while most competitors only cover individual pieces of the puzzle, we are the only ones to offer a comprehensive suite that supports retailers, project developers, asset managers, and banks along their entire value chain, from market screening and site assessment to ongoing inventory monitoring. And we sit on a database that no one else currently has: over 80 million collected and AI-analyzed documents from more than 12,000 municipalities.
Munich Startup: Which decision has been the most important so far?
Julian Freese: The decision to focus on enterprise customers from the outset, rather than a broad SMB model, forced us to build a truly mission-critical product – not just a "nice to have." With customers like Edeka and dm-drogerie markt on board, every feature, every data source, and every service level has to deliver on its promises. This discipline has shaped us as a team and is what makes our product what it is today.
True market understanding as the biggest challenge
Munich Startup: Which phase caused you the most growing pains?
Julian Freese: The biggest challenge was gaining a truly deep understanding of the market and our customers' problems, and translating that understanding into clean, scalable automation. Enterprise customers always bring individual requirements and special requests; that's part of the process. The trick was to maintain this depth for the large accounts while simultaneously building a business model that truly scales. Then there's the sheer complexity of the data processing: capturing, structuring, semantically understanding, and making available in real time over 80 million municipal documents from more than 12,000 sources – that's a technical challenge that shouldn't be underestimated. Solving these three things simultaneously – market understanding, individual enterprise requirements, and highly complex data processing – into a scalable product was the most demanding phase. But it's precisely this step that now makes us competitive and capable of international expansion.
Octoscreen was in 2021 by Julian Freese and CTO Barna Kovacs founded. The startup develops an AI-powered intelligence platform for location, expansion and investment decisions in the retail, real estate and financial sectors.
CEO Julian Freese holds a Master's degree in Entrepreneurship from the University of Liechtenstein. In 2015, he founded Reachbird, an influencer marketing platform, which was acquired by Adesso SE in 2021. The idea for Octoscreen was born immediately afterward.
Munich Startup: Where do you want to be in five years and what absolutely has to happen by then?
Julian Freese: In five years, Octoscreen will be the leading location and retail intelligence platform in Europe – extending beyond retail to include residential, logistics, and office properties. Three things are essential to achieve this: First, internationalization into at least nine European markets. Second, expansion to include new asset classes. And third, we must maintain our claim to be the fastest and most comprehensive data partner in the industry.
More courage to make risky investments
Munich Startup: What works particularly well in Munich's startup ecosystem, and where would you like to see more support?
Julian Freese: Munich has a lot to offer as a startup location: excellent access to employees and talent, plus an extremely vibrant ecosystem with virtually unlimited opportunities – from accelerators and events to networks across all industries. When you build enterprise software like we do, the proximity to industry and corporations is a real advantage; the decision-makers are right on your doorstep. Where I'd like to see more is less conservatism on the investment side. Compared to Berlin, London, or the US, Munich is still hesitant when it comes to riskier business areas. And especially for AI-driven companies, which are currently building the next generation of platforms, I would have liked to see more focus and more courage to invest. There's room for improvement, and Munich actually has all the prerequisites to play a leading role in Europe in this area.
Munich Startup: Remote team or office culture?
Julian Freese: Hybrid with a clear preference for working in the office. We're a small, focused team and believe that the best ideas emerge from face-to-face interaction – especially in the phase we're currently in. At the same time, we collaborate with international talent and leverage the advantages of remote work where it truly makes sense. I think dogmatism in one direction or the other is nonsense.
