Noxtua | Berlin | Sovereign legal AI for law firms | €100M+ Series C | Careers.

mika | Berlin | AI bookkeeping and tax filings | €6M seed | Careers.

Palma.ai | Berlin | Governance layer for enterprise AI agents | $1.8M pre-seed | Careers.

Arcos | Munich | Security platform for critical infrastructure | €5.5M seed | Careers.

syte | Münster | AI analysis of property build potential | €9M Series A | Careers.

Porsche (Stuttgart, autos) could cut a further 4k jobs beyond the reductions already known, according to a supervisory board paper prepared for parent VW.

Mercedes-Benz (Stuttgart, autos) has put the closure of two German plants on the table unless the works council agrees to significant cost cuts.

Evonik (Essen, chemicals) confirmed 3.2k job cuts, 2.15k of them in Germany, with 2.8k due by the end of 2026.

Bilfinger (Mannheim, industrial services) is cutting 1.5k jobs and has lowered both its revenue and profit guidance.

RTL (Cologne, broadcasting) and Sky (Munich, pay TV) are letting 500 people go between them by the end of 2027.

Planet Labs (San Francisco, satellites) is opening a satellite production site in Berlin, pitching itself as a dependable partner for European customers despite its US base. [more, €] · [careers]

Kühne+Nagel (Switzerland, logistics, founded in Germany) will take over the logistics around Amazon's AWS data centres. Annual volume could climb from a high three-digit million figure into several billion dollars. [careers]

GoStudent (Vienna, edtech) will buy Berlitz Germany's in-person business — around 50 locations, integration and language courses, and telc exam centres. [careers]

Rohde & Schwarz (Munich, test and measurement) bought two Dresden space startups to strengthen its satellite arm and chase additional Bundeswehr contracts on a multi-billion programme. [careers]

ETERNO (Berlin, digital health) acquired Berlin's Doc Cirrus, whose cloud-based electronic health record serves more than 8k practitioners, and will now employ 240 people. [careers]

IG Metall is demanding 5% more pay for the metal and electrical industry.

Good news! The OECD raised its German growth forecast to 1.1% while warning about the risks, and the BDI now expects around 1% growth this year [more, €].

Around 690k people became self-employed in Germany in 2025, 18% more than the year before, 70% of them alongside a job and at an average age of 34.2.

The federal government is preparing a second, €25B round of its WIN startup initiative, with pension funds and occupational schemes expected to supply more of the money. [more, €]

Meta (California, social media) was found liable by the Frankfurt regional court for scam ads using Finanzfluss and founder Thomas Kehl's face. The ruling is not yet final. [more]

Choco (Berlin, restaurant ordering) founder Daniel Khachab is handing the CEO job to former sales chief Dave Howgego.

Isar Aerospace (Munich, space) co-founder Josef Fleischmann is giving up the CTO role to start Bavaria Instruments, which wants to process satellite data in orbit and build autonomous spacecraft. [careers]

Vonovia (Bochum, housing) and subsidiary Deutsche Wohnen shares fell to their lowest since 2023 after Linke’s Berlin election win. The two own around 138k flats in and around Berlin.

I was surprised to see LinkedIn's new AI-Skills report that found Germany has the highest AI talent density of the markets it studied. Its especially related to its industrial/manufacturing base with a lot of data scientists, analysts and engineers. Well.

Spending on AI in Germany is expected to grow 48% this year, which will surely include a lot of operational processes. In this BBC video, they discuss the consequences of using AI for job applications. The pressure is immense: in 1995 a graduate vacancy got 38 applications, in 2025 it was 140 (in the UK). Text has no cost anymore, which of course completely broke the text-based recruiting process.

Two AI-first pushes seem to be going into reverse, and we should listen carefully. Meta's Project OT planned an "AI native" workforce with some teams cut by up to 60% across two waves, until Zuckerberg called off the second round hours before the first began because staff were in open revolt and internal data showed the AI agents weren't delivering the productivity gains. At Shopify, where an in-house agent writes as much as half of all production code, Tobi Lütke now warns about the "slop grenades" which staff throw at each other after saying "teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI" back in April 2025.

Berlin Redditors discussed Zalando. Toxic or not? As always, it probably depends of the team.

Reddit: how do you stop being punished with other people's work just because you finish your tasks early?

My least favourite genre of person is the tech guy who quits his job... mine too. 100% on point.