Voice AI startup Wispr raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2B valuation, taking its total funding to $361M, and now has 100K business customers (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

amber, an AI platform based in Aachen, has secured €7 million in Series A funding to develop infrastructure for autonomous business AI. The investment was led by co-investors Ventech, which increased its initial stake, and NRW.Venture, the venture capital arm of NRW.BANK. Bastian Maiworm, co-founder and chief revenue officer, expressed excitement about the backing from these respected investors.

Founded in 2021 by Maiworm, Philipp Reißel, and Igli Manaj, amber aims to make internal company knowledge easily accessible and GDPR-compliant. The platform integrates traditional search, generative AI, assistant features, and automation.

Amber's main challenge is that existing AI tools require users to ask the right questions, whereas the startup's vision is to build an AI system that can understand organisational context, identify user intent, and execute workflows across enterprise data without such input. This approach addresses the issue of fragmented data across emails, documents, cloud applications, and internal systems, which hampers AI performance.

By creating a unified understanding of business information ahead of applying large language models, amber's proprietary AI Data Layer enables more reliable answers, meaningful insights, and automation of complex workflows. The funding will be used to expand across Europe, particularly in the Benelux region, while focusing on integrations with business systems, driving AI adoption among SMEs, and transitioning from user-driven workflows to an autonomous AI system that proactively executes tasks.

Amber currently serves customers in manufacturing, engineering, IT consulting, and consumer goods industries, including notable companies like Scheidt & Bachmann, Ritter Sport, Zentis, Schüßler-Plan, Dalli, and Hailo.