Building a startup in Europe: What visiting 58 Companies in 3 Weeks has taught me

Benedikt Seidel

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Building a startup in Europe: What visiting 58 Companies in 3 Weeks has taught me<br>This is about getting out there and confronting reality: What is really needed?

Benedikt Seidel<br>Aug 21, 2026

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In July I left Munich with two meetings booked. Three weeks later I had visited 58 companies.<br>It started on the Autobahn, the road that lets you drive as fast as you want, a thrill that fades a few hours in. Five hours driving north into the middle of Germany, I was up since dawn and then, traffic. Two hours of road left, three and a half until the meeting starts, and the buffer shrinking. Did I just start off my tour by being late to one of the two pre-booked meetings?

This post is about how two meetings became 58 and why showing up is the best way to get to know the physical economy. A gravel plant and a concrete manufacturer obviously belong together. But why precision metal stamping? Why road works, demolition, bricks?<br>A tour like this needs a name, or it just looks like a confused person driving around Germany. I called it the Physical AI Application Tour .

A few of the places I visited.<br>The idea was simple. The physical economy shapes everything around us, everything we touch, live in or drive with. I wanted to see how AI is actually used in this physical reality. How much of it is already on the shop floor? What would help most? - LLMs, autonomous forklifts, robot dogs, or smart cameras? What do the companies themselves think they need? And how does it feel to run one when your customers can order the same [insert your product here] from anywhere in the world, at any hour?<br>To start this tour off I packed loads of different things, many of which I didn't even use in the end. Seeing what I packed vs what I used, is the perfect analogy of what you think about on the couch vs what you see to be the reality once you are on the shop floor.

The physical AI essentials (from top to bottom, left to right): Camping office chair, battery, extension cord, tripod, light with phone clamp, a sleeping bag, 3D LiDAR + Camera Scanner, Wifi Antenna, camera cable, monitor, camera cable, tiny camera, air mattress and my good old MacBook Air M1.<br>The first stop was a metal stamping company, where I talked the CEO into sitting down with me, together with the person who runs their AI projects. They told me how they were monitoring business processes with “AI?” (in reality it was a ticketing system) and how they had high hopes for efficiency gains. In the end we spoke about all possibilities of what to monitor and what to automate inside the factory. Yes there was some part counting and applications for tracking materials, but reality proved that as long as people are inside a building they are anyway monitoring the space constantly.<br>What stood out was when I asked about new orders. They said it was taking them a long time to do feasibility checks and pricing for new metal parts and even though enough people request quotations they cannot handle all of them.<br>This first learning also hinted that what was needed was something different than I previously thought. While walking through sheet metal coils, in between storage rooms and loud stamping machines, I realised that a digital twin, which is discussed by all robotics and industry “experts”, is something only people who have never seen the reality of a shop floor come up with.<br>The people that actually work here don´t need a digital twin and the people who want it are actually looking for control, for insights gained through thorough analysis. What they want is problems and slow processes remedied by analysing that shop floor. Falsely this leads to technical people saying: “ Hey, we will give you a map and you will figure it out!”. Instead of going deep themselves and fixing those problems.

After this initial factory tour the meeting was over and I set up my office for the rest of the day in the central hub that I was in:

I worked in my office until it got dark and mainly formulated what went down as well as possible solutions to the actual problems I encountered. After coming up with some ideas, I rolled out my sleeping bag next to my car and hoped that there were no boars interested in the forefront of AI deployment research.

The next morning, I woke up next to a lot of Germans walking their dogs in the woods and crawled out of my sleeping bag. I then grabbed a bottle of sparkling water (there was only sparkling water at the supermarket I was at the day before) and took a full body shower behind some trees, hiding from the dog walkers.<br>Optics, or as others call it: not looking homeless, is probably 90% of cold appearances and I wasn’t gonna take any chances of going up to a front desk un-showered. Everything went well and I even had particularly soft hair on this day, which I think shows in the first video of many I posted on X/twitter.<br>Over the next days...