Zentio has closed a €1.4 million pre-seed financing round to accelerate development of its AI-native platform for production planning, the company said in a LinkedIn post. The round was led by HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds and supported by SIVentures (previously Smart Infrastructure Ventures).
The company is positioning its software as a next-generation decision-making system for manufacturers, designed to improve resilience, efficiency, and competitiveness across European industrial operations. Zentio said it is building production planning architecture with artificial intelligence embedded at the core rather than adding AI as an overlay on legacy tools.
Zentio’s platform combines operational data with mathematical optimization and agentic automation to help industrial teams make higher-quality planning decisions. The company said the new capital will be used to speed development of its agent-based system and expand its reach as manufacturers manage ongoing industrial transformation and operational complexity.
Zentio’s founding team blends hands-on industrial operations, go-to-market experience, and deep software engineering, giving the company a practical edge as it scales. CEO and co-founder Julian Rose brings a background in process and logistics optimization with a sustainability focus, including leading CO₂-reduction initiatives and improving logistics processes at Ford. Co-founder and CCO Immo Polewka adds extensive experience in production-process optimization and industrial business development, having led data-driven projects to improve efficiency and safety in chemical and pharmaceutical environments. Co-founder and CTO Christophe Kafrouni leads product and platform development with experience building complex, cloud-native systems and infrastructure for AI production deployments in collaboration with international research teams, pairing technical depth with an understanding of real shop-floor requirements.
Alongside the funding announcement, Zentio said it is hiring as it scales product development and go-to-market efforts. The company encouraged prospective candidates to explore open roles as it works toward what it described as the first generation of AI-native production planning software.
