Australia is racing to build AI infrastructure, but model control and economic power risk remaining offshore. Albanese’s Office of AI and new data centre standards mark progress, yet foreign-led compute and super fund flows expose a growing sovereignty gap.
We are racing to shape our AI future through a new Office of AI and national standards. Yet billions flow into foreign-led data centres while we offer little support for local models or sovereign compute. Without stronger action we risk becoming high-quality hosts rather than true leaders.
Meta's 'Iris' chip enters production in September and OpenAI's 'Jalapeño' targets 50% lower inference costs. The great AI chip rush is reshaping the global supply chain and redefining what AI products are viable to build.
AI Startup: Berlin's GeneralMind Secures $12M for Enterprise AI Autopilot
Berlin-based GeneralMind, founded by the team behind German unicorn Razor Group, has secured $12 million in pre-seed funding to develop its AI-driven "System of Action" for automating enterprise workflows. The platform acts as an autopilot for repetitive white-collar tasks across ERPs and email.
GeneralMind, a Berlin-based AI startup, has secured $12 million (€10.2 million) in one of Europe's largest pre-seed funding rounds to automate enterprise workflows. Founded in 2025 by the team behind German e-commerce unicorn Razor Group, GeneralMind is building an autonomous AI “System of Action.”
The platform is designed to function as an operational layer on top of existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, tackling the unstructured and repetitive tasks that create operational bottlenecks.
The Update and Why It Matters
The Update: GeneralMind has closed a $12 million pre-seed equity round less than six months after commencing operations. The financing was led by a consortium of European and global investors, including Lakestar, Leo Capital, Lucid Capital, Heliad, and BOOOM. The capital will be used to accelerate product development and expand enterprise deployments of its AI Autopilot across Europe. The system is engineered to handle repetitive, white-collar work by autonomously executing workflows across email, spreadsheets, and ERP systems.
"Companies often know exactly where things break down but struggle to turn that insight into operational execution. In e-commerce, I repeatedly saw how email-and-excel workarounds, inefficient manual processes, and painful stakeholder coordination between unstructured email communication and ERP systems create massive inefficiencies in large organisations. That’s exactly what we’re solving for with GeneralMind." — Tushar Ahluwalia, Founder & CEO, GeneralMind
The company, which operates from Berlin and Bangalore, already serves clients listed on the NASDAQ, MDAX, and SDAX exchanges. The founding team’s experience building the German unicorn Razor Group provides significant credibility as they address complex operational inefficiencies in large organisations, particularly within supply chain, procurement, and sales operations.
Why it Matters: GeneralMind is targeting the persistent and costly gap between structured data in ERP systems and the unstructured, manual workflows that connect them. By creating an autonomous “System of Action,” the company aims to eliminate the “human-as-glue-layer” that relies on emails and spreadsheets to manage critical business processes.
This approach moves beyond simple task automation or co-pilot assistance, promising a fully autonomous layer that executes complex operational tasks end-to-end. If successful, this could significantly reduce operational overhead, minimise errors, and improve efficiency in industries like commerce, logistics, and manufacturing, where fragmented communication and manual handovers create constant friction.
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