Munich Startup Raises $3.75M to Teach AI Your Job Before Automating It

Jan de Vries · 2026-11-02

What if AI could learn how your business actually runs—not how you think it runs—before it tries to automate anything? That's the bet behind Marble Cognition, a Munich-based startup that just raised $3.75 million (€3.35 million) in pre-seed funding. The round was co-led by Heartcore and Seedcamp, with angels including a Datadog board member, a Personio founder, and execs from McKinsey, Mistral AI, and Lovable. The money will scale inference, grow the Munich engineering team, and fuel a US launch. ### The Problem: Nobody Writes Down How Work Gets Done Here's the uncomfortable truth: most companies have no idea how their core processes actually work. McKinsey estimates that today's tech could theoretically automate about 57% of US work hours. Yet in almost every company Marble works with, around 90% of core processes live only in inboxes, spreadsheets, and the heads of the people doing them. That's the real blocker to AI transformation—not the technology itself. "Every company we talk to wants AI to take over real work," says co-founder Felix Rösner. "But nobody can tell the AI how that work is actually done. So we solve that first." ### How Marble Cognition Works Marble's approach is simple but powerful: watch first, automate later. Its desktop app records screen activity, clicks, and keystrokes in business apps (never private apps or outside work hours). Employees can pause it anytime, and everything is anonymized before any person or AI model sees it—even in the customer's own cloud. Data is analyzed in aggregate, not by individual. From there, Marble turns each process into a structured map that AI can read like code. Then it deploys Marble Coworkers—AI agents that run the process end-to-end in the tools teams already use, with humans in the loop where judgment matters. > "Our Coworkers watch how the work happens before they take it over. They do it the way your best people do." — Felix Rösner, co-founder ### Early Results and What's Next Marble was founded in late 2025 by Rösner and Christophe Schmit, who met at Munich's CDTM program. Notable customers include EGYM, Mutares, and Enam, plus other tech unicorns and PE-backed organizations. At a PE-owned US financial services company, a Marble coworker cut handling time per case by 90%. In the first month, the team handled 50% more cases without hiring anyone new. The coworker prepares every settlement offer for a specialist to approve—and it learned the process by watching the team, not from documentation. With this funding, Marble plans to scale inference, expand its engineering team in Munich, and launch in the US. For American businesses drowning in undocumented processes, that's a development worth watching.