German startup Zive raises €2.8M for its enterprise AI platform

Hamburg-based Zive, an enterprise AI platform, announced on Tuesday, September 3, that it has secured $3.2M (approximately €2.8M) growth capital from Headline, a European & US venture capital firm.

The German company will use the funds to accelerate its growth while maintaining a leading position in products and services.

What does Zive solve?

80 per cent of company knowledge is unstructured and scattered throughout the workplace. 

Existing tools rely on basic keyword search and manual curation, claims the German company

Desk workers use an average of 11 business apps daily, and it’s estimated they lose 1.8 hours daily searching for information.

Additionally, previous attempts using large language models have shown unsatisfactory results and introduced safety and compliance issues.

Zive: Providing employees access to company knowledge

Founded by Jan Marius Marquardt and Piers Wermbter, Zive is an Enterprise AI platform that gives employees access to existing company knowledge in a safe, hallucination-free AI via an intuitive user interface that works across the web, mobile, and desktop.

The company does it by combining the power of Generative AI and the latest semantic search technology with existing company knowledge.

Zive comes with the following modules:

• Zive Search: Empowers employees to find everything through a unified, hyper-personalised search – the “Google for business”.
• Zive AI Assistant: Provides secure and reliable Enterprise AI that draws on the full breadth of a company’s knowledge. 
• Zive Hub: Presents existing knowledge in a structured way so that employees can explore what’s there, based on their access levels.

The German company acts as an intermediary between your company’s departments (like IT, Human Resources, Finance & Legal, etc.) and the documents they create and apps they use (like Slack, Zendesk, HubSpot, Personio, etc.), and on the other side, third-party LLMs like those created by OpenAI and Mistral AI.

All operations are EU-hosted to comply with GDPR and AI Act regulations, with no LLM provider access to customer data.

“We were able to generate strong traction for Zive in the past months and are seeing increased demand from the market as more and more companies are starting to explore potential use cases for AI. It is just incredible to see how fast companies can launch Zive and the immediate positive effects it has on employee productivity and engagement,” says Jan Marius Marquardt.

The investor

Headline is a Venture Capital firm that invests across geographies, leading rounds at every stage.

The VC’s early-stage funds are based in the US, Europe, Asia, and Brazil.

“Enterprise knowledge management is a problem that has long been looking for a solution. Zive solves it and adds an easy way for companies to leverage the best AI models safely and in line with Europe’s high standards. Jan and Piers have built a real, functioning product in a few months, just the two of them on the team and without proper funding. Having backed AI foundational models like Mistral AI, we are excited to partner up with the entrepreneurs who apply them most concretely,” says Jonathan Becker, General Partner at Headline.