Setting.io

Setting is an office marketplace that supplies startups and fast-growing businesses with subscription leases for customised offices across Europe. Spaces leased through our platform reduce investment overhead to guarantee rapid scalability and flexibility for our clients.

With a focus on consumer-centrism, Setting works to find a solution to any problem your office may encounter. Through our platform, we are able to service both our own unique spaces and provide a way for businesses to market their current office. This marketplace allows clients to find buyers for their current leases or locate individuals to take over unused deskspace. Our high-tech services have created environments in which major companies (Spotify, Pinterest, Groupon) have used to grow their own business.

Setting is the easy way to deal with offices, so you can focus on what’s most important for your business.

Founder

Axel Springer Plug and Play Accelerator

Berlin based Axel Springer Plug and Play is a Berlin-based pre-seed startup accelerator that encourages entrepreneurs to think big and reach global scale through connections to key investors, mentors and clients. ASPnP is a joint venture between the Plug and Play Tech Centre and Axel Springer.

Mentor

hubraum

hubraum is Deutsche Telekom’s tech incubator. By bringing early-stage startups and the leading European telco together, hubraum sparks innovation transfer and creates business opportunities for both sides. Since 2012, hubraum has been collaborating with the digital ecosystem out of its campuses in Berlin, Krakow and Tel Aviv.

Startup Ventures

Various Startup Ventures: 
Onswer - Social based Call Center Business. Located in Sydney, London & San Francisco.
Mothership - Co-working Space on Bulevardul Eroilor. Located in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Cue & Dabb - Social Location Mobile App - Serendipitous Activity. Located in Berlin.

Founder / Owner / Partner

Hannover Consulting

Hannover Consulting provides management services to the railway and transport industry combining operational and transport planning expertise with strategic actionable advice.

Strategy Consultant

Founder @ Setting HQ | Building workspaces that feel like home | Making the Office Search Simple

I’ve lived and worked across five continents - Malaysia, Australia, the US, Eastern Europe, and now Germany. 
Every time I moved, I had to start from scratch, trying to find a space, meet people, and begin again. 

That’s what led me to build Setting HQ - not just offices, but spaces where teams feel like they belong.

Today, we help hundreds of startups and scaleups build their homes in Germany, through offices that reflect their identity, support their growth, and make the chaos of scaling a little more human. My work lives where real estate meets momentum, helping founders turn blank space into something that actually works. 

I care about how teams grow, how culture shows up physically, and why the office still matters (especially when you’re building across borders). 
If you’re expanding into Germany, or just tired of offices that don’t reflect who you are, let’s talk.

Germany just built a $4B AI startup in one year.

And no, this time it’s not in Berlin or Munich.
It’s in Freiburg, a small city surrounded by forest.

The company’s called Black Forest Labs.
Founded by ex-Stability AI engineers.
Their model, FLUX.1, already powers Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot and is taking over Hugging Face leaderboards.

Now they’re reportedly raising another $200–300M at a $4 billion valuation.
Not bad for a team that launched in 2024.
But here’s what makes this story bigger than one startup:
Germany is quietly becoming the underdog of AI.

While Silicon Valley is fighting over hype cycles and compute clusters, German founders are building differently:
Deep technical R&D instead of big marketing plays.
Tight, focused teams instead of bloated org charts.
Sustainable growth instead of endless burn.

Freiburg isn’t Palo Alto.
But maybe that’s the point.
If Europe keeps producing companies like Black Forest Labs, the next wave of AI innovation won’t come from where you expect.
It’ll come from the underdogs.

Johnathan Teh

Heineken just renamed 1,000 pubs “The Office.”
No, seriously.

This isn’t a gimmick. It’s one of the smartest return-to-office plays I’ve seen all year.
Because instead of forcing people back to their desks, they’re doing the opposite:
They’re calling time at the bar, and calling it work.

Here’s the idea:
🍺 Free pint after 4:59pm
👯 Bring 3 colleagues
📍 Pubs renamed “The Office” (so yes, technically, you’re “staying late”)
🥤 And yes, alcohol-free options exist too

But it’s not just banter. The data backs it up:
- 58% of Gen Z hybrid workers have never met some of their team in person
- 72% say the best way to build real relationships is outside of work
- 74% say their best ideas come after hours, not during meetings
- Every £10 spent in a pub adds £13.40 to the UK economy (cheers to that)

Congrats Heineken, you guys nailed the RTO policy 😆

There’s a German town you’ve probably never heard of…
But it just birthed a $4B AI lab working with Meta, Adobe, and Snap.

Welcome to Freiburg, population under 250,000.
But quietly becoming Europe’s most overlooked AI hotspot.

While most eyes are on Paris or London, Freiburg is doing something different:
Not just building fast, but building deep.
Not chasing hype, but solving real infrastructure, sustainability, and logistics challenges.
Not competing with Silicon Valley, but carving its own ethical, academic, applied-AI identity.

Startups here aren’t playing small:
 -> Black Forest Labs: founded by Stability AI alumni. Now Europe’s answer to OpenAI, powering generative tools for global giants.
 -> RIIICO: digital twins for factories.
-> Sereact: warehouse AI that makes 2-person logistics teams competitive.
-> Pluvion & Mondas: building AI for water & energy resilience.
-> Prior Labs: redefining how we use tabular data in ML.
 …all backed by Germany’s quietly growing innovation muscle.

And it's not just this city, Germany added 1,500 startups in just the first half of 2025.
- VC investment up 45% YoY.
- 70% of AI startups collaborate directly with universities.
- And the government is putting €12B into the startup ecosystem by 2030.

We often talk about “ecosystems.”
What’s happening in Freiburg is one of the few actually growing like one, across policy, talent, research, and real-world application.

The future of European AI might not come from where you expect.
And maybe that’s a good thing.

I'm an experienced entrepreneur, start-up strategist, and management executive at the intersection of real estate and technology. I am seen as a value-add to start-ups, growth companies and traditional real-estate firms in Europe, East Asia, and Australia.  

Spoken and panelled on the topic of Future of Work, Startups & Scaleups, and Commercial Real-Estate. Active contributor to the commercial real-estate transformation for modern needs.  

I'm an holder of a Master and Bachelor degree in business from University of New South Wales and Curtin University focused in Business Strategy and Strategic Value Management. Avid fan of food, adventure and human history.  

Fluent in 5 languages with an understanding of both East Asian and Western culture. Live in Germany, schooled in Australia, born in Malaysia. Chinese ethnic. 

Connect with me if you're interested in Future of Work, Startups & Scaleups, and Commercial Real-Estate.

Inja Schneider

n8n just raised $180M.

That’s wild.
But the real story isn’t the number, it’s where it happened, and how.

No Silicon Valley stunt.
No AI-pivot-for-press.
No billion-dollar chest-beating.
Just real product. Real traction. Real community.
→ 700,000 weekly active devs
→ 5,000+ workflow templates (many never shared—they’re too useful)
→ 70K+ YouTube tutorials made by actual users

And they did it from Germany.
That used to be a punchline in startup circles. Now? Not anymore.
The ground here is shifting.

Global companies are quietly landing in Berlin.
VCs are paying attention, for real, not just for the optics.
And founders are proving you don’t need SF to build serious companies.

“We’re doubling down on our community-first principles.”
Most teams would ditch the open-source roots, start chasing CAC, and hire a CRO before the wire hits.
n8n? Still weird. Still global-first. Still grounded.

It’s not just a raise. It’s a signal.
Germany’s not just the expansion market anymore.
It’s where real builders are starting.

Respect to the whole team 👌

🌈 Tad Duval 🌈

A €2.50 cappuccino is apparently too disruptive for Berlin.

LAP Coffee didn’t just open cafés. They engineered a model:
– Compact stores, fast buildout
– Ops automated end-to-end
– Salaried baristas (with bonuses)
– No €5 oat milk guilt trip

In less than 2 years: 15 locations. 
And now?
Graffiti. Hit pieces. Backlash.
Simply because the execution is excellent.

And that’s the uncomfortable part.
We say we want innovation.
But when it actually shows up - packaged, priced, and ready to scale - we get suspicious.

Uber. Airbnb. Dark kitchens.
Every efficiency play gets painted as a threat first.

✅ Build fast
✅ Price fairly
✅ Do what the incumbents won’t
= You’ll get hated before you get studied

What LAP is doing isn’t radical.
It’s just rare in a city where businesses are often slow, fragmented, and underpaid.

The coffee’s not the problem.
It’s the mirror they’re holding up.

Every office has THAT person.

The one who thinks 16 °C is “refreshing.”

In our space this week:
- Someone’s wrapped in a blanket
- Another’s surreptitiously brought a fan
- One (you know who) keeps tweaking the thermostat
- And I’m sipping iced coffee, because it’s 11 °C in Berlin, but inside feels like the Sahara ☕️

Every day it’s the same:
“Who touched the AC?”
“Why is it 16 degrees in here??”
“Why is the meeting room humid?”
“Jonathan, PLEASE fix this.” (I run the company, not the weather)

And yet…I kind of love it.
Because these silly little thermostat wars?
They’re signs of life. Real people. Real space.

The magic isn’t in the fixtures or the floorplan
It’s in the un-Googleable stuff:
- Vent side‑eye
- Thermostat sneak attacks
- Deep debates over “too hot” vs “too cold”

So yeah, our AC might never be perfect.
But I’ll take presence, chatter, and thermostat tension over silence and empty desks any day.

Team Arctic or Team Sauna, what’s your allegiance?
(And no, “neutral” doesn’t count)👇

When I first came to Germany, I thought raising money here would be like anywhere else.
Pitch decks, coffees, follow-ups, the usual dance.

It wasn’t.
German investors are different.
They’re quieter. More disciplined. Less impressed by buzzwords, and honestly, I respect that.
They don’t chase hype. They back substance.

Here, it’s not about the loudest story, it’s about the clearest signal.
You can’t just talk about your vision, you have to show it.
Real traction. Real product. Real results.
And maybe that’s why I like building in Germany.
It keeps you grounded.
As a founder who came here with no local last name, no network, just an idea, I had to learn to build things that speak for themselves.

Berlin might have the energy.
But the capital here?
It’s quiet, steady, and serious.
And maybe that’s exactly what we need right now.

36
That’s the number of rising European startups (out of 100) that call Germany home.
(For comparison: France = 22. UK = 17)

But what fascinates me more is what those 36 are doing, and how that maps to real opportunity.
Many of them aren’t building “another app.” They’re building the infrastructure, the intelligence, and the tooling that other apps will depend on. Agent frameworks, supply chain automation, climate systems, fintech rails, biotech platforms.

And here’s what I see as the “German Edge”, not just where, but how:

1. You win by being the thing others depend on (middleware, APIs, tooling) optionality + stickiness.

2. Marry domain + AI: don’t do AI in isolation; embed it into complex verticals (energy, logistics, healthcare).

3. Leverage local industrial gravity: when you can pilot with heavy industry, logistics companies, large manufacturers, you gain resilience and references.

4. Discipline is part of identity: to make the list, you need serious traction, not just promise.

5. Think global from day one: the world is your market; Germany is your lab.

What these 36 startups show is that location still compounds, not just at the country level, but at the micro level too.
Proximity to talent, capital, and ambition isn’t just convenient. It’s catalytic.
It shapes how fast you learn, who you bump into, and how credible you look on day one.

In the right ecosystem, your velocity changes.
And in Europe right now, Germany is quietly becoming that ecosystem.

Feel like a zombie working from home?

You’re not alone. And no, it’s not your coffee. It’s your context.

Germany’s labour productivity dropped again last quarter. And while the economy’s getting all the blame, we’re ignoring a big factor: people are working from places that kill their energy.

Here’s what they don’t tell you in productivity blogs:
→ Focus isn’t just a mindset. It’s a chain reaction.
→ Energy isn’t a to-do list. It’s environmental.
→ “Hybrid” sounds modern, but without the right setup, it’s just glorified isolation.

The brain wasn’t built to fire in a vacuum.
In the office, you’re in a feedback loop:
• Someone types faster → you pick up speed
• You hear a deal close → you sit up straighter
• You pass a whiteboard → your brain starts solving problems

That’s not culture. That’s behavioral scaffolding.
And when you add good design? Even better.

And guess what?
Just adding a little nature, plants, daylight, decent airflow, increased morale and performance.
The point isn’t “back to office.”
It’s forward to better.
Build the space that flips the switch.
Where your team stops surviving, and starts shipping.
Because right now?
Too many smart people are stuck in soft pants, slow energy, and a setup that does nothing but drain them.

PS: Yes that was my “zombie” Halloween outfit.

My favourite place in Berlin has nothing to do with business.

No deals. No meetings. No one asking for anything.
Just a seat, some silence, and music that makes everything else feel a little smaller and clearer.

The Philharmonie is the one place in this city where I’m not a founder, not a manager, not “on.”
I’m just a person in a chair, breathing again.

When you’re building something it’s easy to lose track of your own head.
Your thoughts pile up. You stop noticing. You start reacting instead of thinking.
That’s why I go.
Same row. Same ritual. Same reset.

One hour here clears more than a weekend away ever could.
You don’t need to go to the Philharmonie.
But find a place that gives you back to yourself.
It matters more than you think.

Ps. My type of instrument? The triangle ;)

The best part of what we do isn’t the spaces.

It’s the people who build inside them.

People like Stefan - founders who bring energy, vision, and purpose into every square meter they touch. 
Working with people like that is a reminder of why this all matters. 
It’s not just about finding the perfect layout or design.
It’s about watching someone chase an idea and turn it into something real.

You can’t help but cheer for them.
Because their drive, their belief, it’s contagious.
It makes you want to build better too.

That’s the real privilege in what we do: seeing other founders grow, and getting to be part of their story, even just for a moment.

PS: Always nice catching up with you, Stefan!

Everyone’s so quick to cancel.

I’ve been “cancelled” more times than I can count.
Not online necessarily, in real life.
A deal that didn’t go through because I said what I actually thought.
A potential partner who ghosted me because my approach didn’t fit their playbook.
Or that LinkedIn post that triggered a storm of comments because I dared to say something that wasn’t mainstream.

We’ve built a culture where disagreement equals disrespect.
Where people cancel first, and ask questions never.

But if you want to create anything meaningful, you will offend someone.
You will say something people don’t agree with.
And sometimes, you’ll lose people because of it.
That’s fine.
Because progress doesn’t come from echo chambers, it comes from friction, debate, and the willingness to stand your ground without losing your manners.

You can disagree without disrespect.
You can argue without attacking.
And you can hold your opinion without cancelling everyone else’s.

So next time someone says something you don’t like, before hitting “unfollow” or “cancel”, try asking why they think that way.
You might not change your mind.
But you might expand it.

Berlin’s office scene just levelled up.

Last week, I had the chance to attend the grand opening of Industrious Berlin, a big moment not just for the company, but for the whole flex space industry here.

Seeing a major international provider like Industrious enter Berlin is a signal:
➡️ The market is maturing.
➡️ Standards are rising.
➡️ And flexible doesn’t have to mean forgettable.

The energy at the event was strong, familiar faces from the industry, new spaces that actually inspire, and conversations that reminded me why I got into this game in the first place.

Congrats to the Industrious team on a strong start. 
Looking forward to seeing how you shake things up in the city!

Everyone’s watching big tech for office trends. They should be watching startups.

Real estate loves buzzwords.
“Hospitality-infused design.”
“Third spaces.”
“Amenitization.”
Catchy terms. But if you’ve built with startups over the last 10 years, none of this is new.

The teams I work with? 
They’ve been living hybrid.
Been running distributed teams across borders.
Been hacking together call booths before Zoom was even a verb.
And they’ve always treated their office like a strategic asset, not just somewhere to put desks.
Because here’s the truth most people in CRE still miss:
For a growing startup, a great office isn’t a luxury.
It’s a lever. For brand, for talent, for culture.
It’s not just about having space, it’s about having a space that feels like yours.

You walk in, and it hits you: 
This is us.
That’s what every founder wants.
Not a beige box with free coffee. Not a shared kitchen with 8 other logos.
A place with texture. Identity. Emotion.

So when I hear corporate landlords talk about “the future of work” like it’s some innovation roadmap, I smile.
Because startups were there years ago.
Zoned layouts. Video-first rooms. All-hands lounges. Branded interiors.
None of this is new if you’ve ever watched a 15-person team go from seed to Series B.

Maybe instead of running surveys, it’s time we listened to the country managers, the ops leads, the founders.
The ones trying to build real teams with no playbook and no room for fluff.
They’re not looking for the office of the future.
They just want one that works.
And looks damn good doing it.

Congrats to the Fides team on the LegalOn acquisition.

Nothing better than seeing good people win, and getting to witness the journey up close.

Lucky to have had them as part of our office community as they grew, built momentum, and turned an ambitious idea into something people genuinely love.

Now they’re scaling on a whole new level.

Lisa, Philippa, Vincent - you built something real.
Big respect. Can’t wait to see what’s next.

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