Berlin's funded startups, and which ones are hiring on Pegel

Handpicked Berlin tracks who is raising money in this city. They have been doing it longer than I have, and their monthly funded-startups roundups are the source for every funding figure in this post. What Pegel adds is the next question, the one a job seeker actually cares about: of these freshly-funded companies, which are open to applications today?

I cross-referenced their lists for 2025 and 2026 against the 258 companies Pegel currently polls. The answer is rougher than I expected. Some of the largest rounds went to companies I already track (Parloa, Upvest, Flink, n8n, Amboss). Others went to companies I do not poll yet, either because they are foreign-HQ with no clear Berlin office or because their ATS provider has no adapter wired up in my codebase. A handful went to companies that have since stopped hiring.

This post is the cross-section. It is not a "best startups to work at" list. The narrator there would have to declare what "best" means, and I cannot. What I can do is read a funding announcement and check whether the company's careers page has any open roles this morning.

One caveat up front. Funding figures, round dates, and the company short descriptions in this post are from Handpicked Berlin. Pegel contributes the cross-reference, the live hiring view, and the framing. None of the numbers below are mine.

2026 year-to-date

Across the first four months of 2026, Handpicked Berlin's roundups recorded roughly €974M plus an additional $671M in announced Berlin rounds. The capital is heavily concentrated at the top: five companies account for the bulk of it.

Parloa raised a $350M Series D in January, the largest single round so far this year. The company builds AI agents for customer service. It is on Pegel, so the live open-roles count is on its page.

Oviva raised €200M Series D, also in January, working on AI-driven digital care for obesity and chronic conditions. Oviva is not currently tracked on Pegel. I have flagged it for the next allowlist review.

Upvest raised €108M in March, on top of an earlier €100M Series C in December 2024. They build investment infrastructure for other fintechs to plug into, and they are tracked on Pegel.

Flink raised $100M in March. Quick commerce, the category that was supposed to be dead, still has buyers. Flink is tracked on Pegel.

Midas raised $50M Series A in April for tokenized investment infrastructure. Not currently tracked on Pegel.

A few smaller rounds are worth naming because the companies are already polled. Qdrant raised $50M Series B in March (vector search). Voyfai raised €25M Series A the same month (AI freight forwarding). Cloover and NetBird both extended earlier rounds in January.

2025 in numbers

The year was less concentrated than 2026's opening months but produced more big-name rounds. The standouts:

n8n raised $180M Series C in October on top of a $60M Series B in March, so $240M in a single year for the AI workflow automation platform. Both rounds are inside Pegel's tracked window.

Amboss raised €240M in March for its medical-learning platform. The largest German healthtech round of the year, and they are tracked.

Wefox raised €151M in July for digital insurance. Their case is the cleanest example of why a funding headline is not a hiring signal. Wefox exited the German market in 2025 and has no active careers page, so it is excluded from Pegel's allowlist (full reason in the YAML header). The capital arrived, the German hiring did not.

Enpal raised €110M in April. Residential solar, the established player in the German market.

Solaris raised €96M Series F in October for neobank infrastructure. Tracked.

Parloa appears here too: €106M in May 2025, on top of the $350M Series D nine months later. The same company shows up in three Handpicked roundups across the window, which is the shape of a company that keeps raising into a category that keeps growing.

Terra One raised €150M Mezzanine in September for large-scale battery storage. Tracked.

Talon.One raised $135M in July for retail promotions. Tracked.

The 2025 long tail had a different pattern from 2026's. A lot of mid-sized rounds (€10M to €30M) clustered around climate and energy, with AI infrastructure close behind. Plenty of seed and pre-seed activity in vertical AI: voice agents, contract management, compliance automation. Below €5M I stopped trying to summarize and let the suggestions YAML carry the rest.

What this tells a job seeker

AI is the dominant funding theme. Roughly half of the rounds I read in this window went to companies whose pitch starts with "AI" or "AI-powered." Voice agents, copilots, compliance automation, freight optimization, medical documentation. The live filtered view for these is at /sectors/ai-ml, which shows only the companies on Pegel's allowlist with currently-open roles.

Climate and energy is the second-largest cluster by capital. Battery storage (Terra One, Terralayr), residential solar (Enpal, Zolar), industrial decarbonization, EV charging infrastructure, building renovation. Read /sectors/climate for the live cut.

Funding does not equal hiring this quarter. Several rounds in the data went to companies with no current Berlin roles on Pegel. Capital moves on a quarterly cycle, headcount on a longer one. A €200M Series D in January 2026 does not mean Berlin job postings will appear in February. Sometimes they appear six months later. Sometimes the round was a debt facility, sometimes a secondary, sometimes a runway extension where the hiring plan is "the same, just longer." The funding announcement is a signal of company health, not of immediate openings.

How to read both feeds

If you care about the Berlin startup ecosystem in a research sense, subscribe to Handpicked Berlin's newsletter. It is the most reliable pulse on who is raising what.

If you care about which of those companies have a role open right now, subscribe to Pegel's daily digest. Different cadence, different question. The two are complementary, not competing. Handpicked tracks the announcements. Pegel tracks who is hiring this morning.

A research file with every Handpicked Berlin company that is not yet on Pegel sits at data/_research/funded-startups-suggestions.yaml. It is operator-review only (ATS handles need verification before promotion), but it is in the repo if you want to see the queue.