Patrick Boert shares how his company raised $1M in pre-seed funding from Merantix.
𝗪𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝗿 €𝟭𝗠 𝗽𝗿𝗲-𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿: Merantix Capital
Deliberate — and personal. Here’s why.
To build AI-native from a blank sheet, this day and age, you don’t need a cheque. You need a partner who’s already done it. Merantix has run one of Europe’s leading AI venture studios since 2016 — building companies like Vara (AI breast-cancer detection) and Cambrium (AI-designed proteins). Not a fund chasing a trend. A decade of conviction.
But it came down to the people.
Rasmus Rothe is the real deal: a PhD in deep learning from ETH Zürich at 26, Oxford and Princeton, a Caltech fellowship, 1,000+ citations — then he turned the science into building. He started Berlin’s Merantix AI Campus and helped shape Germany’s national AI strategy. When someone like that pressure-tests your architecture, you listen.
Adrian Locher has built and scaled 20+ companies and co-founded the AI Campus alongside Rasmus. For a decade now, the two of them pushed Germany and Europe toward an AI agenda that was non-obvious to nearly everyone pre-ChatGPT. Early, when early was still lonely.
That shared ambition between us is the point. We’re not digitising broken hiring — we’re trying to replace it with a different pattern of assumptions. That means frontier AI built in the best of the German ecosystem: people who think big, aren’t afraid of deep technical bets, and back it with real expertise, not hype.
So we build from the Merantix AI Campus in Berlin, surrounded by 60+ AI companies.
Thank you, Rasmus and Adrian, for betting early. Now let’s build something category-defining.