The deep-tech startup Genow, based in Darmstadt, has successfully closed its seed funding round, raising €1.65 million. The High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) led the investment, alongside BM H Beteiligungs-Managementgesellschaft Hessen mbH and experienced angel investors and founders Markus Becker, Sebastian Mönnich, and Dr Mario Lenz. Founded in 2023 as a spin-off from TU Darmstadt, Genow plans to use the new funding further to develop its AI-powered Knowledge Operations Platform, ‘Wingman’. This platform facilitates efficient and highly precise interaction with internal company knowledge from various data sources.
Knowledge Management Remains an Unsolved Core Challenge:
Despite ongoing digitalisation, many organisations still struggle with inefficient access to internal knowledge. Even documented information can be difficult to retrieve, as it is often scattered across multiple systems. At the same time, the retirement of experienced specialists puts valuable expertise at risk of being lost. What is needed are solutions capable of handling the complex, heterogeneous information landscapes of modern organisations and making knowledge accessible and usable across departments.
“Knowledge management remains one of the biggest hurdles to successful processes and decisions,” says Sara Jourdan, CEO and co-founder of Genow. “Many employees spend 20 to 30 per cent of their day searching for information in unstructured data sets.”
AI-driven Knowledge Processes for Every Business Context:
The Genow founding team spent several years conducting in-depth research at TU Darmstadt on the use of generative AI in enterprise environments. They found that traditional AI solutions often fail in everyday business settings due to a lack of context. Genow’s “Wingman” directly addresses this challenge by providing a scalable Knowledge Operations Platform that intelligently consolidates fragmented knowledge from systems such as SharePoint, Confluence, Jira, and DMS solutions. This makes the knowledge accessible and usable in context.
Wingman is already being used by leading international enterprises, helping thousands of employees to quickly access and apply internal knowledge productively.
The platform doesn’t just understand content semantically – it also incorporates company-specific metadata, terminology, and relationships, enabling highly accurate and reliable responses, even to complex queries. At the same time, it helps to identify knowledge gaps across the organisation. Companies can configure custom AI applications tailored to specific functions, such as HR, sales, compliance, customer service, or engineering. The goal is to rethink knowledge management fundamentally and provide a future-proof solution for building, preserving, and leveraging internal knowledge.
The platform can be fully deployed in the customer’s cloud environment, meeting the highest standards for data security, scalability, and control.
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“With Genow, we are investing in a team that has developed an excellent research-based, scalable solution to one of the central problems of knowledge work,” says Sebastian Schnell from BMH. “Wingman impresses with its technological depth, practical relevance, and significant market potential.”
Felix Assion, Investment Manager at HTGF, comments: “We are seeing a lot of startup activity in this promising market, but few teams understand the needs of large corporations as well as this one. After an impressive bootstrapping phase, we are excited to see what they will achieve with these new financial opportunities.”
Markus Becker and Sebastian Mönnich, Business Angels: “The Genow founding team impressed us with their blend of technological expertise and strategic vision. With Wingman, Genow is setting new standards in corporate knowledge management, and we see great potential here for the future. We are delighted to be part of this journey.”
The seed funding will be used further to develop the technology, particularly in agent-based knowledge processes, and to support market expansion.
About Genow:
Genow is a deep-tech startup based in Darmstadt (Germany), empowering companies to efficiently and precisely interact with their unstructured, fragmented enterprise knowledge through its Wingman platform. The Knowledge Operations AI platform enables organisations to easily and securely scale specialised AI applications, making knowledge processes more efficient and effective by preserving and generating new knowledge. Founded in 2023 by Dr. Timo Koppe, Adrian Glauben, Dr. Sara Jourdan, and Prof. Peter Buxmann.
About HTGF – High-Tech Gründerfonds:
HTGF is one of the leading and most active early-stage investors in Germany and Europe, financing startups in the fields of DeepTech, IndustrialTech, ClimateTech, DigitalTech, Life Sciences, and Chemistry. With its experienced investment team, HTGF supports startups in all phases of their development into international market leaders. HTGF invests in pre-seed and seed phases and can participate significantly in later-stage financing rounds. Moreover, across its funds, HTGF has over 2 billion euros under management. Since its inception in 2005, HTGF has financed more than 770 startups and achieved almost 200 successful exits.
