Merantix 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, “Choose Your Model Size: Any Compression by a Single Gradient Descent”

​​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 Backbon"

​​          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”

​​          Bastian Woidt, revel8,  “How we use Make”

​​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!

🎟️ Apply to join below!