Merantix AI Developer Day 2025
Merantix DevDay 2025: Built for Builders
AI is reshaping the world - but it doesn’t build itself (yet!). Behind every breakthrough are researchers and engineers turning bold ideas into real systems, real products, and real impact.
That’s what DevDay is about.
On 29 August at 09:00 AM, we’ll gather at the Merantix AI Campus to celebrate the people who make AI happen. It’s a day for our developer community to connect, share, and dive deep into the real work of building applied AI from infrastructure and research to deployment and ethics.
Feel free to bring your laptops and work from the area, listen in on deep dive talks and presentations, and connect with the engineering community at Merantix.
We’ll feature a range of external keynote speakers alongside engineers from our portfolio ventures like Momentum, Briink, revel8, and more - all sharing what they’re building and learning, under the hood.
🎤 Keynote Speaker Highlights:
Jakob Uszkoreit – Co-inventor of the Transformer, Founder at Inceptive
“First Principled Suspension of Disbelief”
Philipp Hacker – Professor, European University Viadrina
Regulating Fine-Tuning: Policy and Legal Frontiers of AI
Noah Hollmann, Co-Founder Prior Labs,
Why Your LLM Fails at Tables - The case for tabular foundation models
Thomas Jarzombek – State Secretary, German Digital Ministry
Topic TBC
Ralf Herbrich – Director, Hasso Plattner Institute
Tutorial: Message Passing as a Probabilistic Learning Method
AGENDA
09:00–10:00 — Doors Open
Coffee & Croissants
10:00–10:15 — Welcome
Thomas Wollmann + Rasmus Rothe
10:15–11:00 — Keynote speech
Jakob Uszkoreit - “First Principled Suspension of Disbelief”
11:00–13:00
Track 1 - "The Rules of Intelligence"
Philipp Hacker, Europa University, “Regulating Fine-tuning”
Thomas Jarzombek, State Secretary Digital Ministry, “National AI Strategy”
Robert Kilian, CertifAI, European AI Regulation: A Balancing Act
Track 2 - "Ideas in Action"
Idil Sülö, Deltia, “Dataset Curation with Vision-language models for Activity Recognition”
Noah Hollmann, Prior Labs, “Why Your LLM Fails at Tables - The case for tabular foundation models”
Martin Genzel, Merantix Momentum, “Can Compressing Foundation Models be as Easy as Image Compression?”
13:00–14:00 — Lunch Break
14:00–14:45 — Keynote speech
Ralf Herbrich, HPI, “Tutorial on message passing as a probabilistic learning method”
14:45–16:45
Track 3 - "Building the Backbone"
Miha Garafolj, Merantix Momentum, “Clyravision: Orchestrating a Team of AI Agents for Deepfake Detection”
XI Chen, Briink, “Integrated feedback collection and evaluation of Briink platform using LangSmith”
Robert Seilbeck, revel8, “Enterprise Software with Startup Resources"
Track 4 - "AI, Realized"
Till Scholich, Ficus, “Autonomy vs. Automation in AI Products”
Sebastian Rämisch, Cambium, “How we use concept bottleneck models for protein engineering”
Max Schumacher, Libra, “Trust, but Verify: Agentic AI in Legal Tech”
16:45–17:00 - Closing Remarks - Thomas + Rasmus
We believe AI is a catalyst for human potential — but only if we build it together.
We can’t wait to see you there!
— The Merantix Team