1.4 million pre-seed for Zentio

The Berlin-based startup Zentio has closed a pre-seed financing round of €1.4 million. The round was led by High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and supported by SI Ventures. The financing is intended to accelerate the further development of the AI-based production planning platform and the expansion of the team.

AI-first platform for industrial production planning

Zentio is developing a system for AI-native production planning in real time that centralizes all operational, machine and production-related data and structures it using autonomous AI agents. This creates a self-learning effect that offers decision-makers unprecedented transparency across the store floor.

The combination of operational data, mathematical optimization and agent-based automation enables companies to manage disruptions with confidence and plan weeks in advance.

Immo Polewka, Co-Founder and CCO Zentio

The goal: to increase productivity, minimize downtime and make production decisions based on data instead of fragmented information or Excel spreadsheets.

Why the industry needs a new solution

European industrial companies face thousands of interlinked decisions every day, from shift planning to machine utilization to material availability. Even small changes can have a major impact along the entire value chain.

Existing systems are barely able to map these dependencies. The result is millions lost due to inefficient planning, tied-up capital reserves in the warehouse, delivery delays and unused capacity.

We are investing this round in the expansion of our ML pipelines, mathematical optimization models and the integration of our agents. To this end, we are building a strong engineering team to implement the first generation of AI-native production planning with us.

Christophe Kafrouni, Co-Founder and CTO Zentio

Zentio starts here and offers a framework that not only digitizes, but fundamentally transforms how industrial decisions are made.

Support from investors

HTGF sees considerable potential in Zentio's approach.

Excel and other outdated tools still control much of the industrial world in the background. Zentio transforms these chaotic data structures into an AI-native planning layer.

Hendryk Hosemann, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF

SI Ventures strengthens the consortium with experience in building early B2B technology companies.

Outlook and the startup

Zentio intends to use the funding to intensify existing pilot partnerships and roll out its technology more broadly in European industry. The focus will be on expanding the ML infrastructure, further automation layers and a user-friendly interface for operational teams.

Zentio was founded in Berlin in 2025 by Julian Rose, Immo Polewka and Christophe Kafrouni. The company develops an AI-supported production planning platform for manufacturing companies that translates operational data. The start-up is working on the future of the AI-native factory with pilot customers and industry partners in several European countries.