Team

Silicon Valley speed meets German engineering.

Engineers and researchers who have shipped AI agents into live enterprise systems and built for the shop floor. Based in San Francisco and Munich.

Our manifesto

Every product a factory makes should leave it better prepared for the next one.

Today most of that knowledge disappears. It sits unused in production data, gets lost in shift handovers, or lives in the heads of the few people who know how the plant really runs. Every time a product changes, coordination starts again from zero.

We believe the next industrial leap starts in the execution layer.

Horizontal turns industrial entropy into intelligence. We connect to the systems a plant already runs and learn how it really builds things. From that, Horizontal keeps a living model of the factory that AI agents can understand, reason over and use to coordinate the work on the shop floor.

The factory starts to reason about itself.

A factory that can reconfigure itself overnight iterates at the speed of software. That is how physical innovation speeds up. Progress moves as fast as we can build things, and a factory that adapts without waiting on manual coordination brings new products and better processes to life much sooner.

Horizontal is the operating system for factories run by AI agents and people, from today's operators and machines to tomorrow's humanoids.

Where we come from

Researchers fromETH ZürichTechnical University of MunichStanford University
Engineers from companies likeLioInfineonBMWRWEMAN
Backed byY CombinatorUnternehmerTUM IncubatorTUM Venture Labs Software / AI
Our founders

Horizontal was founded by Niklas Marxer and Jakob Hermeler, mechanical engineers who trained at ETH Zurich, TUM and Stanford and met in a robotics and automation research project at Stanford. Both have spent their careers around the systems that turn ideas into physical things, and they started Horizontal to change how that entire stack works.

Niklas Marxer

Niklas Marxer

Co-Founder & CEO

Niklas is a builder at heart, drawn to the point where software starts to move the physical world. At askLio (YC S23) he was the first hire for the US go-to-market in New York, helping global enterprises through their AI transformation and taking more than 150 AI agents into live production systems. He saw the company grow from 12 to 130 people. Now he is building the platform that lets factories run themselves.

Previously at askLio and Infineon · M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering, TUM · Research at Stanford

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Jakob Hermeler

Jakob Hermeler

Co-Founder & CTO

Jakob studied robotics at ETH Zürich, graduating in the top 5% of his year, and was a scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung) and the DAAD. During his research he built an ultra-low-latency reinforcement learning policy for drone recovery that set an industry record by a factor of two.

Previously at BMW and MAN Energy Solutions · M.Sc. Mechanical Engineering, ETH Zürich · Research at Stanford

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We're hiring.

We are looking for forward deployed, AI and founding engineers, and our first go-to-market hire.

See open roles