YC-backed Zeit AI raises €5 million to build Europe’s “autonomous data engineer”

Zeit AI, a Munich-based startup building the autonomous data engineer for Europe, today announced that it has closed a €4.3 million ($5 million) funding round.

Investors in this round include Y Combinator, the University of Oxford’s Seed Fund, the Sequoia Capital Scout Fund, ACE Ventures and Hasso Plattner VC, the investment fund of the SAP Founder. The round also saw participation from angels, including former German Federal Minister of Finance Christian Lindner, World Cup winner Mario Götze, Meta board member Charlie Songhurst, Martin Schoeller of Schoeller Group and Helsing CTO Robert Fink.

“Europe’s industrial base cannot outsource the decisions that run it. Zeit AI is one of the few companies making sovereign infrastructure the default rather than the compromise,” said Jens Schmidt-Sceery, Partner at Hasso Plattner VC.

Founded in 2024 by Palantir alumni Leopold von Waldthausen and Marvin Bornstein, Zeit AI is building the autonomous data engineer for the European mid-market. The company states that its product, ZeitMind, connects ERP, CRM, and more than 600 other source systems, and uses an AI agent to build analytics-ready applications from them, traceable down to the individual transaction, and operates in German data centres.

The company notes that although mid-sized European companies own their data, they lack the capability to fully use it. Anything the ERP or the FP&A system doesn’t support becomes an Excel workaround that costs ten days a month and never goes away.

The German startup claims that with ZeitMind, a controller describes what they need, and the agentic system delivers the automation, analysis or application the same afternoon. The company highlighted that all customer data is processed exclusively in Europe and that no internal IT capacity is required.

“We could run this company profitably, but we are now supercharging the playbook we have put together over the past two years and expanding the team in Europe across Munich and an office in London that is to come,” Leopold von Waldthausen, CEO and co-founder of Zeit AI, mentioned in his LinkedIn post.

Zeit AI’s customers include the technology group Kolbenschmidt, the agricultural machinery manufacturer Horsch, the agricultural trading group Allgaier Agrarhandel, the logistics company Wahl & Co, the Munich-based consultancy Stern Stewart & Co, and the Luxembourg-based aviation company Jetfly Aviation.

The company plans to use this capital to reach more businesses and hire the engineers who deploy the agent.