Mozilla and HPI (Oracle JVM research) doing cutting edge work.
Ableton and Native Instruments as world leaders in niche but influential software.
Car2Go and Coup with major financial backing from Mercedes and Bosch.
Tons of small seed-stage companies funded by the great smaller VCs here. ECB central bank policy pushes a lot of money into startup investment.
They are actually perfect example of the German mentality in investing in startups - fairly secure plays which they can understand.
As far as early stage investments companies go, it's not as nice as you make it sound. Have a look at any list of startups and apart from infarm (which is great and I've worked there) and maybe n26, most are ecommerce platform plays and some fintech (of which most are too late to the game). A lot of the people in my network wanting to do something different had to go elsewhere
I feel like in recent years the startup scene in Berlin has gone rather off rails, with obviously flawed projects getting funding. The truth of the startup scene is that >99% of projects are pretty bad, and never deserved to leave the brainstorming phase in the first place.
/s
