Responsible AI in Enterprises: Blockbrain’s €17.5m

Note: The following contributions are personal impulses from Max Eckel. They represent individual reflections and are intended to stimulate discussion and further thought.

What happens when a 20-something business grad teams up with a serial data entrepreneur and a former Bosch tech executive? Apparently: a €17.5m Series A.

A while ago, I wrote about Honza Ngo (BSc 2020 / MSc 2022) and the unusual founding setup behind Blockbrain. Fresh out of WHU. No technical background. Teaming up with Mattias Protzmann, Statista co-founder and multiple-time exited founder, and Antonius Gress, former Bosch tech executive and RPA expert. Back then, it was a 7-figure round.

Now Blockbrain just raised €17.5 million to scale their approach to responsible AI agents in enterprises. The surface story is clear: AI is entering companies fast. But the deeper problem they’re tackling is something that genuinely concerns me.

Inside most organizations, knowledge is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Some of it sits in tools. Some in old slide decks. Some in Slack threads. A lot of it lives in people’s heads. When people leave, context disappears. When teams grow, stories get fragmented. When new joiners arrive, they see documents but not the thinking behind them.

I’m obviously not working in an enterprise. I coordinate a university-based community. And still: I often say that communities run on stories. The best ones don’t just create them... they compound them. Why did someone start a company? How did a crazy idea survive the first 12 months? Which intro changed everything?

In our ecosystem, many of these stories live in WhatsApp chats, voice notes, late-night conversations, or in the memory of a few individuals. They don’t automatically become part of the collective memory. That's something that keeps me up at night. Because if stories aren’t captured and made accessible, the next generation has to relearn everything from scratch. 

That’s one of the biggest inefficiencies I want to fight. That’s why I’ve been experimenting more and more with tools that help record, structure, and make these insights searchable. Tools that don’t just store information, but preserve context.

Blockbrain is doing this at enterprise scale. They’re building infrastructure that connects internal knowledge in a secure, structured way so AI agents can actually work with it responsibly. And when you think about it, that’s a massive leverage point. AI models will keep getting better. The real advantage will come from how well you can access and use your own knowledge.

And I still love the founding setup behind this: A young business grad with drive. A seasoned data entrepreneur. A deep enterprise technologist. Huge congrats to Honza, Mattias, Antonius and the whole Blockbrain team on the €17.5m Series A.

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