Leopold von Waldthausen
Founder/CEOI spent 3.5 years at Palantir, where I ended up leading all established customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Before that I studied CS at Oxford, published research on process mining and cryptography, and quit an MBA at Yale. I started my first business, weview, at 18, ran it for three years and sold it to DemoUp Cliplister.
Marvin Christopher Bornstein
Founder/CTOBefore Zeit AI, I spent five years at Palantir, where I owned and deployed the first instances of what became AIP, across chemicals, railway infrastructure, media, utilities, insurance and medical equipment. Grew up around Berlin, spent the last five years in London. Writing software for 18 years, professionally for ten, mostly full stack and data engineering. Deep learning research, more hackathons than I can count, and a weakness for InfoSec CTFs.
Origins
For years we worked side by side at Palantir, building with some of the largest industrial companies on the continent. Leopold led the established customer business across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Marvin owned and deployed the first instances of what became the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). Together we shipped projects that turned into more than €50M in new revenue.
In summer 2024 we left. We had seen what forward-deployed engineers do for large enterprises, and one thing kept showing up: the people who actually run a business, the heads of controlling, the buyers, the plant managers, are still moving data by hand. The signal sits in the ERP, in the CRM, and in a dozen tools that do not talk to each other. So decisions get made in spreadsheets and on gut feel. The gap between the two is where companies lose time, money and confidence.
With today’s frontier models that work can finally be done at software scale. So we are building the autonomous data engineer for the mid-market. ZeitMind connects SAP, your ERP, CRM, HR systems and 600+ other sources, prepares the messy data, and turns everyday business questions into live dashboards, reports and applications, all in natural language.
We joined Y Combinator in S24, put it in front of real controlling, procurement and supply chain teams, and went from zero to €1M ARR in twelve months with six people, customers live in weeks and no IT support needed. Today we are 12 engineers, builders and operators across Munich and London.