Berlin-based
Zentio has closed a €1.4 million pre-seed funding round led by HTGF, with additional support from SIVentures. Alongside capital, the
investors will provide strategic and operational support for Zentio’s next
phase of growth.
Industrial
companies make thousands of decisions every day, from minor operational
adjustments to major strategic shifts, and each choice can trigger ripple
effects across the entire value chain. A change in shift scheduling, for
example, influences machine utilisation, which affects inventory levels, cash
flow, and storage costs. These decisions are highly interdependent, yet no
single person or existing system can fully oversee and simulate all these
impacts in real time.
Most
companies lack the resources to analyse every scenario, leading to suboptimal
planning, reduced productivity, capital tied up in inventory, missed delivery
deadlines, and underused capacity. To move beyond simply digitising existing
processes, manufacturers need a new approach that fundamentally changes how
decisions are made.
Zentio
addresses this by enabling AI-native, real-time production planning. Its system
structures and centralises operational, machine, and production data through AI
agents, creating a self-learning flywheel effect. This depth of shopfloor-level
insight helps factories turn operational data into a strategic asset, enhancing
productivity, adaptability, and decision-making at scale.
As Immo Polewka, co-founder and CCO at Zentio, explains, the best way to bridge this
gap is by moving forward:
Our vision is to elevate the standard of decision-making
in European manufacturing. By combining operational data with mathematical
optimisation and agentic automation, companies can plan ahead strategically and
respond to disruptions with confidence.
This
approach allows decision-makers to anticipate capacity needs weeks in advance,
respond to machine breakdowns or material shortages with the best available
options, and adjust shift schedules or machine settings in real time to
increase output and minimise idle time.
Founded
in 2025, Zentio is working with a network of pilot customers and strategic
partners across Europe to advance its vision of AI-native production planning.
Our main focus for the coming months is to advance our
core mathematical systems and ML pipelines and tie it all together with UX and
agents. To achieve this, we’re expanding our team with ambitious engineers who
want to join us in building the first generation of AI-native production
planning,
added
Christophe Kafrouni, co-founder and CTO of Zentio.
The new funding will enable Zentio to deepen existing
partnerships and lay the groundwork for long-term impact across European
manufacturing.