News & Podcast

Summertime is vacation time. And so our Pitch & People videocast is also taking a summer break until early September. To make sure you don’t get bored waiting for the next episode, we’ve put together the five best pitches from a year of Pitch & People for you. Enjoy watching and have a great vacation!

Trees can’t say when they’re thirsty. The Munich startup Treesense wants to change that. With sensors directly inside the tree, the team makes water stress measurable – helping cities water their trees more purposefully. This saves water, working hours and, in the best case, thousands of trees. Semir Babajic, co-founder of Treesense, in conversation on Pitch & People.

What began as a side project between two agency managers developed into one of Germany’s best-known supplement brands within a few years. In the Pitch & People live talk at the Kinoliebe Festival, Marlena Hien explains why Bears with Benefits was never reliant on investor funding, why profitability was underestimated for a long time – and why the exit was still the right step in the end.

Declining reach, shrinking advertising revenues, and AI fundamentally changing internet search. Many publishers are under pressure. Munich-based startup Articly wants to address this precisely: using AI, the team transforms articles into audio briefings and podcasts within minutes. In the videocast Pitch & People, co-founder Lukas Paetzmann explains why audio could be a major opportunity for journalism.

Declining reach, shrinking advertising revenues, and AI fundamentally changing internet search. Many publishers are under pressure. Munich startup Articly wants to tackle this precisely: Using AI, the team transforms articles into audio briefings and podcasts within minutes. In the videocast Pitch & People, co-founder Lukas Paetzmann explains why audio could be a major opportunity for journalism.

Why do even experienced investors fail? For Katja Ruhnke from CK Ventures, it’s part of the business. In the Pitch & People video cast, the entrepreneur and business angel talks about why she continues to invest despite this, why people matter more to her than the idea, and why impact takes precedence over quick exits for her.

Voiceline is now one of the most exciting AI startups in B2B sales, but the path to get there was anything but straightforward. In a conversation on Pitch & People, founder Nicolas Höflinger talks about a painful pivot, laying off much of his team, and the realization that even good technology can fail without clear focus.

In the videocast Pitch & People, Auditr founder Elias Müller speaks openly about the dark side of founding. Between a full-time job, dwindling savings, and sleepless nights, he builds his startup around the EU AI Act. Why he still believes in his idea, how he gains his first customers, and why the first euro in revenue will feel better to him than any salary.

Many parents search for answers – Saskia Müller turned that into a startup. In the video cast Pitch & People, the founder of Stellamia discusses individual parenting guides, the importance of connection in everyday family life, and her vision of supporting parents over the long term.

After her studies, Fabiola Munguia actually wanted a secure job in a large corporation. Today, she leads Secfix, one of Europe’s fastest-growing cybersecurity startups. In the Pitch & People videocast, the founder talks about her journey from El Salvador to Munich, a crucial strategic pivot, and why founders shouldn’t fall in love with their first idea.

As a child, Yue Wu struggled to keep up at an elite school in Shanghai. His grandmother saved him—with patience, system, and daily tutoring. Today, the Rocket Tutor founder wants to make exactly this form of individualized support accessible to millions of students using AI, as he explains in the video podcast Pitch & People.

Personal bankruptcy, a failed million-euro investment, and yet the founding of a startup: Katrin Stopp von Falkenstein has built Law.me, a legal tech app that enables initial legal assessments via AI and is intended to promote out-of-court conflict resolution. In the video cast Pitch & People, she talks about her unusual path to entrepreneurship.