#28: are you richer than you think?

PLACED | Berlin | AI sales platform for recruitment agencies | €1.8M | Careers.

Novus | Braunschweig | Carbon e-bike with switchable registration | €10M+ | Careers.

Rabot Energy | Hamburg | Dynamic electricity tariffs, virtual power plant | €50M Series B | Careers.

seragy | Hanover | Biomarkers for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's | €12M | Careers.

Smycles | Magdeburg | Assembles human and AI-agent teams | €1.5M | Careers.

Elevatry | Munich | AI for strategic procurement negotiation | €3M pre-seed | Careers.

YGO | Potsdam | AI infrastructure for travel booking | €8M Series A | Careers.

Volkswagen (Wolfsburg, autos) wants to freeze pay with zero rises through 2030. IG Metall say this could cost staff about 10% in real income; bargaining starts in late November.

Zalando (Berlin, e-commerce) reportedly raised its planned 2027 office requirement from three days a week to five, according to employee posts on Reddit. [more]

Amazon (US, e-commerce/cloud) plans to invest more than €16B in Germany in 2027, in jobs, data centres, logistics and AI infrastructure. [careers]

Sanofi (France, pharma) broke ground on a €2B insulin plant in Frankfurt, the EU's largest, due to open in 2032. [careers]

Tesla (US, autos) is pushing ahead with expanding its Grünheide plant in Brandenburg to 1M cars a year, up from under 500k.

Covenant (US, defence tech) is setting up cruise missile production in Leipzig and is first hiring around 50 people, mainly skilled workers from the car industry.

BMW (Munich, autos) closed its voluntary severance programme early after about 5k employees applied in under two weeks, part of roughly 8k job cuts worldwide.

Germany's offshore wind supply chain has about 23k jobs at risk as expansion stalls. [more, €]

Eurowings (Cologne, airline) cancelled flights over higher kerosene prices and is considering short-time work (Kurzarbeit).

Qiagen (Hilden, diagnostics) is the subject of a bidding war between EQT and KKR that could value it at more than €9B.

Delivery Hero (Berlin, food delivery) had the sale of its Taiwan Foodpanda unit to Uber blocked by the local competition authority. [more]

Bonial (Berlin, retail marketing) acquired Nordic peer Tjek, growing from two to six European markets. [careers]

Galeria (Essen, department stores) secured a loan from a US investor that funds its Christmas trading, weeks into its fourth insolvency.

Burda (Offenburg, media) is splitting its media business and its holdings into separate companies, each with its own management.

Raisin (Berlin, fintech) will be supervised by Bafin as a financial holding company, which brings stricter oversight and higher capital requirements.

Adidas (Herzogenaurach, sportswear) posted record Q3 revenue of €7.25B and raised its 2026 operating-profit outlook to €2.5B. [careers]

Trade Republic (Berlin, fintech) grew its 2024/25 net profit to €232.6M from €34.8M, on €754M revenue. [careers]

DocMorris (Switzerland, online pharmacy) raised its full-year guidance again after 21.5% revenue growth in Q3, and broke even on EBITDA earlier than planned.

Almedia (Berlin, adtech) reached $1B in annual recurring revenue with Freecash, three times last year's level. [careers]

German industry has lost about 496k jobs since 2019, an Ifo study found, most of them in automotive, metal products and mechanical engineering, while services added 2.2M. [more, €]

A very valuable reminder from Reddit to always save the job description the moment you apply. The best way is to keep a folder for application with all the files included and even named starting with a date: YYYY-MM-DD Company. Also, times are hard at the moment: and its a numbers game (this Redditor had 218 applications and got 7 interviews to finally land a job). Go on, apply even more and use job boards like ours with direct company job board access (LinkedIn isn’t the best place to source jobs!). I am rooting for you.

We have two forces at play: AI supposedly impacting the job market vs serious skilled-labour shortage. IW says that Germany's skilled-labour shortage could grow 47% to 723k by 2029. The answer is kind of offering itself: if you are sure you will lose your job to AI, the best way would be to change your profession.

On the other hand, AI slump is nowhere to be seen, except among younger people. IAB Forum reports that employment in highly AI-exposed occupations grew about 1% between 2022 and 2025, while less-exposed ones fell 3%. Among 20–29-year-olds, AI-exposed jobs did shrink faster (3.8% vs 2.6% in 2025), but the authors blame mostly the recession.

Let's stay with AI. The transcript is paywalled, but the free part is already excellent and you should probabaly listen to the whole thing. Ethan Mollick tells Derek Thompson that everything and nothing is changing at the same time. And I see it in my daily work: AI is an extremely strong improvement for "single players" but much harder to accelerate teams in "multiplayer" mode. If you don't need to wait for someone, you’ll be crushing it, because the only thing you need to “convince” is your AI.