German startup trail bags €1.45M to develop copilot for AI governance

Munich-based trail, a technology startup building the copilot for AI governance, announced on Thursday that it has raised €1.45M in a pre-seed round led by early-stage investor CapitalT.

Other investors participated, including NP-Hard Ventures, Mozilla Ventures, Common Magic, and various business angels.

The German company will use the funds to accelerate its product development, expand its talented team, and strengthen its market position.

“We are in the perfect time and position to continue tackling this very important and rapidly growing market of AI governance. The mission of trail is to empower companies deeply committed to AI quality and trust, enabling responsible AI development and use without additional overhead”, says co-founder and CEO, Anna Spitznagel. 

trail: Developing-friendly AI governance solution

Anna Spitznagel, Nikolaus Pinger, and Sven Hölzel found trail after they experienced the bureaucratic challenges and a lack of transparency in AI firsthand.

This led them to merge trust and efficiency in building trail, a platform for AI governance. 

The startup’s AI governance copilot provides a developer-friendly solution for scalable, trustworthy AI development by aggregating, analysing, and structuring project data to enable compliant AI at scale.

Companies use trail to automate governance workflows, technical documentation, and transparency for compliance with the EU AI Act and certifications like ISO 42001.

Its website offers a free self-assessment tool to determine the EU AI Act obligations for any AI use case.

The investor

CapitalT is a venture capital fund focused on the (pre) seed stage that invests in software technology companies that solve real problems with AI or have a strong data component, have international potential, and have amazing teams.

The VC currently invests in companies in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Germany.

Eva de Mol, Founding Partner at CapitalT, comments, “We were impressed by the complementary strengths of the founders and their AI-driven approach to bridging technical and compliance challenges. We are convinced that trail is set out to lead this essential mark.”