Hello there,
a new project! Together with my friend Simon we developed Make the cut, a four-day retreat in Brandenburg for anyone with a big work decision they keep postponing: a product idea, a pivot or a career change. Check it out and let us know if you are interested by registering. Since I am a recovering "everything is a priority" addict, I am really excited about it.
Closer to now: our coworking at The Delta is on Monday, 26th of October (few spots left!), and, finally, Everyday AI Club is back on the 3rd of November, this time for product teams. Both are linked in the events section below.
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📌 Pinned
Unfortuntely, it is! This might, in combination with AI-related layoffs, have big political consequences. SZ has an interesting piece about fewer jobs for young graduates. Between January and August 2026, job ads for graduates with up to three years of experience fell 40% compared with 2022, from 138k to 83.5k. Meanwhile, the number of unemployed graduates under 30 almost doubled, from 23k in 2022 to 45k in 2025.
The steepest drop is in information and communication, with 56% fewer ads than in 2023, which is probably a clear impact of AI. Consulting, engineering and research are down 51%, manufacturing 39%. Construction is the exception: down only 14%, and up 7% on last year thanks to the €500B infrastructure fund. By state, Baden-Württemberg is hit hardest (−48% vs. 2023) and Bremen least (−29%). On the positive note, Germany is returning to solid growth which might improve the situation.
If you were starting your career today, what would you do?
👀 Jobs
4 job highlights of the week - 🚨 jobs are now updated daily!
tado — Team Lead Accounting — Munich
Impossible Cloud — Chief of Staff — Hamburg
🌍 Community board
Are you into tea? Phil quit his tech job and built Tealytics, an app for tea lovers. It's live on the App Store and he is looking for first users to try it and share feedback.
Need help with a digital product or website? Veronica is a freelance product designer helping startups and growing teams with UX research, design and conversion work — get in touch for project-based support.
Last week I asked you whether your company has too many or too few managers: 30% about right, 25% way too many, 23% a few too many, 12% too few, 8% too small or not in a company, and 2% zero.
💸 Funded in Germany
OllyGarden | Berlin | Fixes bad telemetry before observability | $4M seed | Careers.
TODAY | Berlin & Copenhagen | AI agents for financial advisors | €2.8M seed | Careers.
Ubitium | Düsseldorf | Universal chip for physical AI | $14M seed | Careers.
1KOMMA5° | Hamburg | AI energy management for homes | €70M | Careers.
Causa Prima | Munich | AI agents resolve B2B invoices | $20M seed | Careers.
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📡 Signals
Galeria (Essen, department stores) will have its insolvency wages — about €25M a month — paid by the Bundesagentur für Arbeit after all, as the retailer's fourth insolvency in six years puts at least a third of its stores at risk.
Ryanair (Ireland, airline) is closing its BER base on 24 October, withdrawing all seven stationed aircraft and axing 12 routes including Gran Canaria, Palermo and Thessaloniki. They blame Germany's "exorbitant" aviation tax and state fees. [more]
Mall of Berlin (Berlin, real estate) has lenders considering selling off around €550M of loans on the shopping centre. [more]
MicroAGI (Munich, robotics) hit $100M+ in annualised revenue just six months after launching Shift, its robot-data platform. They are hiring. [careers]
Doctolib (Paris, health tech) is taking a minority investment from NVIDIA that it says will speed up its AI hiring. [careers]
Varta (Ellwangen, batteries) is restarting its household-battery division as an independent business after the group's insolvency, keeping around 990 jobs and planning fresh investment at its Dischingen site.
Universal Quantum (UK, quantum computing) raised over €89M in a Series A, the largest ever for a UK quantum company, and plans to expand its German hub in Hamburg along with Singapore, the US and Japan. [more]
Taco Bell (US, fast food) opened its first German location in Cologne. Berlin, Bonn and Stuttgart are next on the list.
Uniper (Düsseldorf, energy) got a non-binding takeover offer from Apollo in a government-run sale process. The state-owned utility would be worth around €10B.
Lufthansa (Cologne, airline) is reportedly winning the bidding war for Portugal's TAP, offering the full purchase price in cash and undercutting Air France-KLM's bid.
Porta (Porta Westfalica, furniture retail) is facing a formal EU Commission probe into XXXLutz's proposed $1.1B takeover, which would combine Porta's 140+ stores with XXXLutz's network of over 1,800.
Solaris (Berlin, fintech) is now valued at almost €0.5B, a big rebound from the €25k after Japanese investor SBI took control in early 2025.
Bonial (Berlin, retail marketing) acquired Nordic retail-marketing company Tjek, expanding its footprint from two to six European markets. [careers]
Ergo (Düsseldorf, insurance) is selling its structural sales arm Ergo Pro, formerly HMI, which made headlines in 2011 over a prostitution scandal.
Trade Republic (Berlin, fintech) employees describe a harsh "rank and yank" culture of frequent performance ratings and dismissals, according to internal documents. [more, €]
Deutsche Bank (Frankfurt, banking) CEO Christian Sewing said the government's labour reforms don't go far enough, calling for weaker dismissal protection specifically for top earners.
Germany's government raised its 2026 growth forecast to 1.3%, up from 0.5%, citing exports, state investment and higher defence spending.
Take that, AfD! Foreign workers contributed €68.3B — 10.5% of regional output — to eastern Germany's economy in 2025, per an IW Köln analysis. [more] Without continued immigration, eastern Germany's population would shrink by more than an eighth by 2035 and a fifth by 2045.
Antler anaylsed 27.6k funding rounds from 3k+ startups since 2015 and only 24% of German startups that raise a seed round go on to reach Series A. Success is higher (51%) if they raise at least €2M in seed and land an insititutional VC as lead in under 12 month from pre-seed. [more]
Audi (Ingolstadt, autos) saw deliveries fall 19.7% in Q3, with a quarter fewer cars sold in China and a sixth fewer in the US over nine months — unlike BMW, Audi doesn't build in the US, leaving it exposed to tariffs.
Schaeffler (Herzogenaurach, auto parts) wrote down €240M in its e-mobility division as European carmakers order fewer parts for the China market.
📅 Events
This week we reviewed 95 upcoming events and handpicked 15. Check all 30 events at luma.com/handpicked
Featured events
Handpicked Berlin Coworking at The Delta in Neukölln: a work-focused day with other members of the community. Short intro round, optional lunch and networking, free phone booths, coffee and tea, and a subscription discount for participants. Monday, 26th of October, 9:00–17:00.
Everyday AI Club is back, this time for product teams: PMs, designers, data people and product engineers sharing how they use AI day to day, from discovery to shipping. We keep seats per role, so apply early. Tuesday, 3rd of November, 18:30–21:00 at HomeToGo in Prenzlauer Berg.
Our picks
GTM Tech Week x OpenAI Meetup - The Future of Agentic GTM (Berlin) | Thu, 15/10 18:00 | Circuit
Rooftop Cocktails & Compute by Hyperbolic | Tue, 20/10 17:30 | Berlin, Germany
Zero to Scale: Building GTM in the AI Era | Wed, 21/10 09:00 | Berlin, Germany
Pierogi Social Club | Polish Halloween Party | 30.10. | Fri, 30/10 20:00 | Club of Polish Losers
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🧭 Career compass
Burnout sick days up 77%: these are the professions hit hardest, from Kununu, based on the new absence report of the AOK's research institute WIdO. Three in four of the roughly 2,500 employees surveyed felt exhausted by their work, sick days for mental illness among AOK members rose 42% in ten years to 403 days per 100 insured. Call-centre and customer-service staff are hit hardest, with 39 mental-health sick notes per 100 members in 2025, followed by home and family care and elderly care.
Reddit: Wow, this sucks! An applicant flew back from vacation for Check24's final onsite interview, only to get an email on landing in Munich that the junior developer role had been filled.
Reddit: an embedded software engineer at a German company of 300–500 people asks whether it's normal for foreign engineers to carry the technical work while local colleagues spend their time in meetings. Anecdotal evidence throughout, but an interesting read. I sometimes felt that I needed to show more as an Eastern European in my corporate career, but I have absolutely no evidence to support this claim.
AI is a tool. Using it well takes skill, a blog reply to Clojure creator Rich Hickey's LinkedIn piece "'AI' is Not a Tool". Huahai Yang argues that LLMs count as tools even though they're unpredictable and that results depend on the user's judgement. It makes sense: AI is a mirror of the user. Never ever be afraid of calling out a lazy prompt.
Cherry Ventures released Heartbeat 2026, a dataset of 10k European companies with some interesting data. For example, women make up 10.1% of founders and 79% of unfunded companies have a single founder. It wasn't clear to me how it is possible that they have 10k companies and 10k founders in the same dataset.
German startups raised €4.5bn in the third quarter, the best quarter since the end of 2021 and almost four times as much as a year earlier, according to KfW Research. With €9.5bn since January, 2026 has already beaten the full years 2023, 2024 and 2025. AI startups got 69% of the quarter's money, and KfW's chief economist says capital is concentrating on ever fewer companies.
😅 Memewhile
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