Kyrok, a Berlin-based industrial AI startup founded in 2025, has raised €3.1M in a pre-seed round led by Speedinvest.
Additional investors include Arve Capital, the family office behind active pharmaceutical packaging company Sanner, Dr. Marcell Vollmer, former Chief Procurement Officer at SAP, Dr. André Heeg of BCG, Dr. Stephan Rohr of TWAICE, the founders of Langdock, and Rodrigo Martinez via HelloWorld. The capital will fund continued development of Kyrok’s AI operating system, additional modules, and team growth in Berlin.
Addressing The Market Opportunity
A significant share of Europe’s pharmaceutical and chemical production still runs on SAP R/3 software from the 1990s, supplemented by Excel and the institutional knowledge of employees approaching retirement. Europe’s chemical sector alone comprises around 31,000 companies, 97 percent of them SMEs, directly employing over 1.2 million people. The pharmaceutical industry adds an estimated 950,000 jobs across the continent.
The consequences of this fragility are already visible. The European Commission found that over 50 percent of recent critical medicine shortages in the EU were driven by manufacturing issues, compounded by dependence on active pharmaceutical ingredients from India and China. In chemicals, Europe’s share of global production has fallen to 13 percent while China now accounts for 46 percent of global sales. For the SMEs that form the backbone of both sectors, ageing workforces, supply disruptions, and intensifying international competition are converging at the same moment.
Advertisement
How The Technology Works
Kyrok‘s AI operating system sits as an application layer on top of existing ERP systems, requiring no migration. Rather than switching between the ERP and multiple other tools, supply chain teams work in a single modern interface where AI agents guide them through their workflows and learn from each interaction, gradually transferring process knowledge from individuals into the system itself.
The first module targets customer service teams, covering order intake and industry-specific workflows. Production planning, material planning, and procurement modules are in development. The system is designed around a human-in-the-loop approach, where AI agents handle routine work while the final decision rests with the employee carrying responsibility. All data is held GDPR-compliant on European infrastructure in Frankfurt am Main.
Growth And Market Traction
Several pharmaceutical and chemical SMEs are already running the platform in its pilot phase. Kyrok reports that the system captures more than 80 percent of complex orders without errors and frees up significant time on routine tasks while reducing error rates.
Christoph Staub, CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical SME Konapharma, described the practical impact: “Kyrok takes a huge amount of work off our shoulders. We get back the time we need for the things that genuinely matter to our customers. What convinced me is that the system makes suggestions, but the final call stays with the employee who carries the responsibility.”
Before writing a line of code, co-founders Daniel Hofinger and Lukas Bierfreund conducted more than 200 interviews with decision-makers in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries and analyzed production and ERP processes across plant visits and workshops. Hofinger’s previous software ventures have together served more than 1,200 SMEs and generated eight-figure revenues.
Expansion Plans
The pre-seed capital will support continued development of the operating system, the rollout of additional modules beyond the initial customer service functionality, and strategic team growth in Berlin to meet rising demand from European pharma and chemical SMEs.
Looking Ahead
Daniel Hofinger, CEO and co-founder of Kyrok, described what he has seen on the ground at the companies the platform is built for: “We visit production sites where order lists are printed out in the morning, carried into the next room and typed back into another system. The people doing this work are extraordinary, holding disjointed systems together by hand. They deserve tools from this century. Our goal is to make a concrete contribution to a competitive European SME sector.”
Florian Obst, Partner at Speedinvest, outlined the investment rationale: “Daniel and Lukas have already shown that they can make industrial companies more competitive through technology. With Kyrok, they are modernising an entire sector without taking it offline to do it. That is exactly the kind of leverage Europe needs to keep its SMEs competitive and its pharma and chemical supply chains resilient.”
About Kyrok
Kyrok is a Berlin-based industrial AI company founded in 2025 by Daniel Hofinger and Lukas Bierfreund. The company is building the first AI operating system for supply chain teams at pharmaceutical and chemical SMEs, deploying industry-specific AI agents to handle routine tasks in customer service, production planning, and procurement while keeping humans in control of decisions. The platform sits on top of existing ERP systems with no migration required and operates on GDPR-compliant European infrastructure.
