Munich Startup: What problem do you offer a solution for?
Maximilian Resch, Co-Founder: 70 percent of the knowledge in a company is implicit. It exists only in people’s minds, not in handbooks, documents, or systems. That applies just as much to a manufacturing plant as to a medical practice, a law firm, or an accountant who has known for years what was never written down anywhere. When experienced employees leave—whether due to retirement, waves of layoffs, or a job change—this implicit knowledge is lost forever. Knowmanity preserves it before that happens.
Munich Startup: What can only you do as of today?
Maximilian Resch: We are not just another document management tool, but the first platform for AI-driven implicit knowledge management based exclusively on approved content. No covert crawling through systems, no hallucinating, but real collections of human experience, semantically linked in a knowledge graph. Implicit knowledge isn’t written down anywhere—we capture it. The digital knowledge twin doesn’t leave the company when the person leaves; the team can continue to maintain and update it afterwards.
By capturing implicit knowledge in this way, detailed action steps and organizational recommendations such as fast onboarding, process optimizations, gap analyses, and knowledge gaps can be transparently revealed. A motto: “What if your company knew what it knows?” And our explicit-only ingestion architecture is patent pending.
Idea was sketched on the balcony railing
Munich Startup: What was the trigger for founding the company?
Maximilian Resch: A barbecue on the balcony. During conversations about loss of knowledge, digital transformation, AI applications, and data chaos in large corporations. Our balcony railing is made of frosted glass, so we just started writing away. People as the most important information carriers, knowledge is lost because nobody has a system to preserve it in time. That’s also where our name Knowmanity (Knowledge + Humanity) comes from. Once we had sketched that out, the solution was right there. That very same night, we registered our first domain.
Munich Startup: Was there ever a moment when you thought about giving up?
Maximilian Resch: Honestly, no. The conviction that implicit knowledge is one of the most underrated problems in companies has driven us from the very beginning. What challenges us on a daily basis is something else. Product development while simultaneously acquiring our first customers is a balancing act. But it motivates us because we see that the problem exists in so many companies.
Revolution for Onboarding and Offboarding
Munich Startup: How would you know in a year that you are on the right track?
Maximilian Resch: When a customer tells us that we helped them reduce knowledge loss caused by turnover in their company and that their knowledge twins have revolutionized onboarding and offboarding. Viewing the company through the eyes of employees is seamlessly integrated into decision-making. Initial reference customers, an honest case study – that’s the path to get there.
Munich Startup: Would you found a startup in Munich again, and why?
Maximilian Resch: We both live in Feldkirchen, right outside Munich. To be honest, that was a coincidence, not a strategic plan. But Munich is proving to be a good starting point. Large companies, high turnover. Exactly where a lot of knowledge leaves the company every day. Research and development as well as the startup ecosystem in Munich fuel the spirit.
Munich Startup: Perfection or speed?
Maximilian Resch: Speed. We built Knowmanity alongside our full-time jobs and launched it in under a year. Feedback from the first real users is always more honest than any internal discussion about a new feature. “Which company would actually pay for our solution?” was a more important question than the perfection of the solution.
