The young Bielefeld startup Tentris, founded in 2024 by Alexander Bigerl, Tobias Rebert, Nikolaos Karalis and Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo as a spin-off from the University of Paderborn, wants to establish a new generation of graph databases.
“These represent knowledge in a similar way to the human brain; not as individual data points, but as networked information. This allows companies and AI systems to find the right answers and make better decisions much more quickly,” says the team, which was the overall pitch contest winner in STARTUPLAND in 2026.
The Swiss venture capitalist Bloomhaus Ventures, the Munich financier Vanagon Ventures, the Berlin SME tech investor altitude (whom the team met at our STARTUPLAND Conference), 10x Value Partners and business angel Pascal Wichmann recently invested 925,000 euros. In addition, there was 1 million euros in the form of funding (EXIST).
In an interview with deutsche-startups.de, Tentris founder Rebert speaks in detail about the state of affairs in his company.
How would you tell your grandmother? Tentris explain?
Imagine that a company’s information is spread across thousands of folders, databases and programs. We are building the technology that connects all this information and makes the right connections visible. Specifically, we are developing a new generation of graph databases with Tentris. These represent knowledge in a similar way to the human brain; not as individual data points, but as networked information. This allows companies and AI systems to find the right answers much faster and make better decisions.
How do you want to make money – so how exactly does your business model work?
Our core product is TentrisDB, an enterprise RDF graph database. Customers use our database to efficiently store, analyze and make large amounts of connected data usable for AI applications. We pursue two business models: On the one hand, we license our software to companies that want to operate it in their own infrastructure or private cloud. On the other hand, we are currently building a database-as-a-service offering where customers can use Tentris directly from the cloud. We also support companies in introducing and integrating the technology.
How is the idea? Tentris developed?
The idea for Tentris came from research. The foundation stone was laid by our co-founder Alexander Bigerl’s master’s thesis, in which he developed a completely new approach to processing knowledge graphs. Building on this, Alexander and our co-founder Nikolaos Karalis deepened the technology over several years as part of their doctorates at the University of Paderborn. Over time, it became clear that this approach was not only scientifically interesting, but also had the potential to solve a fundamental problem of modern data infrastructures. This ultimately led to the decision to bring the technology onto the market in the form of a startup.
In the spring you rocked the pitch stage at STARTUPLAND. How do you now look back on that day?
We look back on the day very fondly from a little distance. Of course we are happy about the success on stage, but the conversations that resulted from it were particularly valuable. In fact, we even met one of our current investors at the event. This shows very well how important such events are for young companies. Aside from the competition, it’s the people you meet, the new perspectives and the unexpected opportunities that make the biggest difference in the long term.
What were the biggest challenges you have had to overcome so far?
The biggest challenge was turning years of cutting-edge research into a product that companies could actually use. There are many challenges between a scientific innovation and market-ready software: from product development to financing to building the right customer relationships. At the same time, we operate in a market that is dominated by large international providers. As a young deep tech company, we not only had to prove that our technology works, but also that we can be a reliable partner for companies in the long term.
Where it says Tentris in a year?
I hope that in a year we will no longer have to answer the question of what Tentris actually does, but will be able to show the difference our technology makes with customer projects. In a year, we would like to successfully support the first companies in productive operations, have brought our cloud solution onto the market and continue to grow. But what is most important to us is that with Tentris our customers can find answers faster, make better decisions and finally fully exploit the potential of their data.
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