Berlin is Germany’s number-one location for new founders - for now. In a year when Germany set a record with 3,568 new startups, Berlin saw 619 new foundations, up 24% compared to 2024. It is the country’s funding capital, drawing around €2.7 billion of venture capital in 2025, about 31%, and it holds €169 billion in ecosystem value, including 16 healthy unicorns. Turning more of the early-stage and most promising companies into global category leaders is where the city still falls short, and converting its world-class science into venture-scale industries is where it falls furthest behind. On top of that, Berlin undermines the talent it attracts through a shortage of housing, language barriers and bureaucratic hurdles that stop the city from building on strengths that reach well beyond the existing tech scene. The causes are structural. The friction sits in the layers between the immigration office, labs, universities and research institutions, early customers and the first euro of invested capital, and those are exactly the layers public policy support with.

This is a bottom-up paper. Its diagnosis comes from more than 80 ideas submitted by over 920 practitioners through the BAD1 campaign process, clustered into five priority areas, stress-tested in an expert ideation workshop, and turned into pilot-ready concepts at a hackathon. Around 4,000 community members now back the movement, and the asks in this paper are ordered to reflect what they voted for. The Startup-Verband’s ‘Born to Change’ paper asks how to keep Berlin’s best companies from leaving. This paper asks how to build the pipeline that produces more of them in the first place.

What this paper adds to the existing body of analysis is the part that is usually missing. It sets out a concrete, tiered set of asks formulated by the founder community directly and addresses the State of Berlin, to allow them to strive.