At the beginning of the year we hunted down 10 exceptionally promising German startups to watch in 2021, and, in case you missed it, more recently we covered 10 super promising startups from Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Cologne. Today, we’re shifting the focus to Hamburg.
Known for its famous harbor area, Hamburg is also home to a booming startup ecosystem, hosting the annual OMR Festival, an online marketing and startup event gathering over 50,000 attendees each year. The German city previously made it into our annual ranking of Europe’s biggest startup hubs.
For this article, we’ve scouted promising early-stage startups based in Hamburg, founded between 2018 and 2021, taking into consideration team size, funding, growth rate, innovation, and market size. With all this in mind, here are 10 exceptionally promising startups from the German city to watch out for in 2021 and beyond.
airfocus
is a modern and modular product management platform. It provides a complete solution for product teams to manage and communicate their product strategy, prioritize their work, build roadmaps, and connect feedback to solve the right problems. Designed with flexibility in mind, airfocus allows teams to quickly customize the platform to fit their needs without disrupting the way they work. Founded in 2018, the productivity startup has raised €6.3 million to help companies around the world make better decisions with their software tool for objective, data-driven prioritization, and effective roadmap planning.
Localyze
is an all-in-one platform that makes it easy for companies to manage their global mobility needs in one simple place. It guides companies through global mobility challenges, from relocating new hires to visa changes, postings, and transfers between offices. Created in 2018, the female-founded startup has raised around €11.4 million to facilitate relocation support for companies and individuals. Their software solution also covers insurance policies, housing options, and cultural integration, with all relevant information and documents in one place.
Born in 2018, cirplus is a global marketplace for recyclates and plastic waste feedstock. The sustainability-driven startup is on a mission to make buying and selling recycled plastics easier and more efficient. Their next-generation B2B marketplace connects the plastic and recycling industries to make plastics 100% circular. ciplus serves as the digital catalyst of the circular economy with a product catalog ranging from unsorted waste to regranulates and compounds. The team aims to lower the transaction costs for recycled plastics and thus massively reduce the environmental footprint of plastics overall.
With 85% of all plastics produced worldwide in landfills or polluting our oceans, traceless materials (founded in 2020) addresses this global challenge with a sustainable alternative to single-use plastics. The startup’s patent-pending technology and a circular economy approach aim to transform agricultural industry residues into novel materials: traceless film, traceless plast, and traceless coat. These advanced materials’ properties are comparable to those of conventional (bio)plastics while being completely bio-circular, based on food production residues, home compostable, not harmful in any way, and competitively priced.
Evernest
is on a mission to redefine the buying and selling of residential real estate in Europe’s metropolises. The proptech startup combines the real estate expertise of their brokers with AI technology and intelligent data analysis to offer brokers and their customers a platform for a transparent, seamless, and personal customer experience. Founded in 2019, the team has raised over €6 million to guarantee a sale in the shortest possible time at the optimal price. They do this with an extensive database on topics such as market development, the environment, infrastructure, individual property features, and comparative properties.
receeve is a fully customisable all-in-one platform that simplifies the complexity of data and systems. It enables teams to easily automate processes, deploy communications and apply 360° insights to maximise recovery and minimise risk across every stage of the credit management value chain, from pre-delinquency to portfolio assignment or sale. receeve’s cloud-native, no-code platform is fast to deploy, simple to manage, and easy to customise and expand. Founded in 2019, the team has raised over €16 million to accelerate growth throughout Europe and other parts of the world.
Aiconix.ai
offers B2B solutions that aim to improve productivity by giving customers simple and immediate access to the most recent AI innovations. Their AI one-stop-shop platform offers a range of features like face recognition, speech-to-text conversion, and labelling from pictures and videos, in addition to other exclusive features. Launched in 2018, the team has raised €1.9 million to help creators monetize their audio and video content by making information searchable and accessible through Aiconix’s AI solutions.
UNOWN
is an end-to-end platform for the non-ownership economy. The platform enables brands to secure a share in the growing leasing market. They lease out their assets through Unown’s revenue share model and get access to deep usage data. Unown service enables customers to rotate their wardrobes while maintaining an efficient and conscious lifestyle. Founded in 2019, the team has raised around €900K to empower customers to experience fashion with a completely new mindset. Unown believes that through leasing, resources can be used smarter, longer, and, in doing so, create higher value per asset.
NATIX
has developed a software solution that aims to make cameras smart and GDPR compliant. The AI and event detection software suite delivers cost-efficient, privacy-preserving (GDPR compliant), and easy-to-use solutions for cities and industries in order to improve urban life and work environments. The event detection AI Modules can detect objects such as humans, bicycles, vehicles, clothes, and equipment, and it also understands the direction and trajectory of a moving object. Clients only need to connect the AI processors to the camera, install the software and let the system track a change in any given state.
claimsforce
is a SaaS solution for P&C claims handling. The startup aims to provide an excellent claims experience by combining human competence with data-based software. Their software helps insurers, regulators and experts make better decisions and supports customers with every claim from the disposition and control to the appraisal and evaluation. Founded in 2018, the team has raised over €7 million to make existing claims IT infrastructures of insurance companies and regulatory organizations smart.
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