[비즈한국] Every year at the end of September, a slightly unusual scene unfolds in Munich, Germany. The subways are flooded from morning until night with men wearing leather breeches (Lederhosen) and women in dresses with aprons (Dirndl), which don't look particularly breathable. They are prepared to head to the festival grounds after work, as they are on their way to Oktoberfest, the world's largest beer festival. At the same time, at the Munich International Exhibition Center, founders carrying laptops and pitch decks, venture capitalists, and corporate innovation leaders are bustling about. This is because Bits & Pretzels 2026 is being held from September 28th to 30th.
Started as a founder breakfast, combined with Oktoberfest
Bits & Pretzels had humble beginnings. It started around 2014 as a breakfast gathering for about 80 founders in Munich. Since then, it has grown rapidly in scale, and with world-class figures like Richard Branson, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman taking the stage, it has become one of Europe's premier startup events, extending its reach beyond Germany.
While the scale may seem smaller compared to other startup events or exhibitions, it is more vibrant than any other. This is thanks to the heart-shaped pretzels and unlimited beer provided during the event. The final day of Bits & Pretzels takes place right at the Oktoberfest grounds. The organizers rent out an entire tent called Schottenhamel, providing a venue where participants can engage with investors without the formality of a boardroom.
The Schottenhamel tent is the most iconic location at Oktoberfest. It is the place where, every year, the Mayor of Munich taps the first keg and announces the start of the festival in the Bavarian dialect by saying, “O’zapft is!” (It is tapped!). Oktoberfest began in 1867 in a small beer booth with 50 seats and has since grown into a massive tent that accommodates about 9,000 people. The beer is supplied by Spaten, a traditional Munich brewery.
Bits & Pretzels transforms this historic space into a massive startup networking venue for one day. At over 300 long wooden tables, founders, investors, and corporate executives sit together. This year, about 250 “Table Captains” led the conversations. These captains are famous investors, founders, and leaders in the startup ecosystem. While investment consultations often conjure images of people in suits sitting face-to-face in a conference room, here, discussions about investment and business happen over 1-liter beer steins.
A total of 7,500 people participated in this year’s Bits & Pretzels. According to the organizers, this includes over 3,000 founders and more than 1,700 investors. The assets under management by the investors present total approximately $390 billion, and over 21,000 meetings were scheduled between founders and investors over the three days. More than 600 decision-makers from large corporations also attended.
Looking at the numbers, it might seem like just another large-scale startup event, but as I looked back on this year’s Bits & Pretzels, one question stood out more than the number of participants: What will Europe compete with in the future? And the answer, unexpectedly, was closer to the industrial competitiveness that Europe has long possessed rather than “another American-style software company.”
“Europe needs more global companies”
One of the most interesting messages at this year’s event came from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt stated that because Europe has a sufficiently large market and consumer base, it is capable of building its own unique companies in various industries, including pharmaceuticals and financial services. The problem is that not enough of those companies grow to a global scale. His specific proposal to the founders in Munich was to apply AI to manufacturing.
Imagine a manufacturing process where you define a difficult design problem in the morning, AI creates a new design, it is printed overnight with a 3D printer, and tested the next day. The idea is to imagine a manufacturing industry that iterates daily from design to production and testing. The conditions Schmidt suggested were simple: “It has to be smart, it has to be fast, and it has to actually work.” The takeaway was that by combining AI and manufacturing, Germany could still create a unique competitive edge.
This remark accurately captures the atmosphere of this year’s Bits & Pretzels. As the global startup market’s interest has been focused on generative AI over the past few years, the question “Where is the European OpenAI?” has been repeated in Europe as well. However, the mood in 2026 was a little different. How to apply AI to industry has become more important than AI itself.
Germany should do what it’s good at, and introduce AI to it!
Walking around the venue, you can easily spot this change. UnternehmerTUM, the Munich-based startup support organization representing the Technical University of Munich (TUM), put Frontier AI and Industrial Horizons at the forefront of this year’s Bits & Pretzels. This involves applying cutting-edge, high-performance AI technology to traditional manufacturing sectors such as production, construction, and logistics.
During the event, separate Frontier AI roundtables and the TUM Venture Labs’ Industrial Horizons program were held. Not only founders and investors, but also universities, research institutes, and industry players discussed the intersection of AI and industry in the same space.
In Munich, this is not a very unfamiliar combination. Munich is home to global manufacturing companies like BMW and Siemens, active engineering and natural science research centered around the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and has long established a system for turning research results into actual startups through organizations like UnternehmerTUM and TUM Venture Labs.
Recently, AI, robotics, aerospace, quantum technology, climate tech, and defense tech have been combined with these. A few years ago, the words that dominated European startup conferences were SaaS, fintech, and platforms, but now the mood is definitely different. Deep tech, defense tech, industrial AI, robotics, and climate tech were the keywords for this year. This is a trend of trying to commercialize the industrial and research capabilities that Europe originally possessed through startups.
From the lab to the company
Another scene to note at this year’s Bits & Pretzels was the ‘EXIST Startup Factories’. EXIST is a university startup support program that the German federal government has operated for a long time. Recently, the German government has taken a step further, pushing for a ‘Startup Factories’ policy to create large-scale startup hubs around universities and research institutions.
The Startup Factories initiative, which began in 2025, aims to more closely connect scientific and technological research, industry, and founders to rapidly convert research results into high-growth companies. At this year’s Bits & Pretzels, the achievements and future tasks were introduced to mark the program's first anniversary. The core emphasis of the program was clear: ‘Science to Business.’
The German government’s policy goal is to not end with creating good papers or patents through the Startup Factory policy, but to create a path where researchers can start businesses, meet with industry, and grow into companies. Germany has world-class research institutions like Max Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, and Leibniz, along with numerous technical universities. The key is how quickly that research can be turned into a company and then scaled for the global market. Through this policy, the German government is trying to build a system where startups can emerge repeatedly, rather than waiting for a few good ones by chance.
Back to ‘Humans’
Interestingly, the official theme of this year’s Bits & Pretzels was not AI. It was “Human After All.” In an era where AI writes code, automates corporate tasks, and even investors use AI to find startups, the event aimed to put the founder back at the center.
By introducing this theme, Bits & Pretzels reaffirmed the role of the founder: taking risks, enduring failure, making judgments in uncertain environments, and leading organizations.
It may sound a bit cliché. However, if you walk around the venue, you understand why this theme emerged. While the main stage talks about AI and massive markets, the actual concerns of the founders remain very human and practical.
Where do I find my first customer? How do I persuade investors? How do I hire good employees? How do I navigate Germany’s complex regulations? Can I survive until the next investment? If I go abroad, who will open the door for me first?... AI can take over many tasks. However, a significant part of the process of building a company is ultimately about persuading people and building relationships.
Therefore, while founder pitching sessions and speed dating with investors were arranged digitally through the official event app, on the other hand, most of the event’s meetings were made in a “human-scented” old-fashioned way, with on-site first-come-first-served registrations and post-it notes on matchmaking boards.
There was also a small experiment that demonstrated this philosophy. They changed the pitching format where only investors judge startups. In typical startup events, founders go on stage, explain their company to investors for a few minutes, and judges evaluate them. The Golden Pretzel Award, introduced this year, took a slightly different structure.
11 early-stage investors selected startups they invested in or were paying attention to, and the founders and investors went on stage together to compete. It moved away from a format where only the founder stands before the judges. It is a way to show ‘which investor believed in this team and why,’ rather than evaluating the success of an early-stage startup solely on the individual pitching ability of the founder. It showed that the relationship between founders and investors is also changing from one-sided judgment to partnership.
70 matchmakers, the ultimate networking event
What distinguishes Bits & Pretzels most from other startup events is the networking, the way they make people meet. The organizers limit participants to 7,500. It is not an environment where anyone can buy a ticket and enter; they manage the ratio of founders to investors and employ a staff of 70–80 people specializing solely in matchmaking to get them to meet. The matchmakers wearing red t-shirts at the venue actively ask participants who they want to meet, grasp exactly who has come to the event, and connect both sides.
The ultimate example of this obsession with networking is its combination with Oktoberfest. At first glance, it looks like a kind of event marketing that combines a startup event with a beer festival, but in reality, it is a very clever networking device.
In conference halls, the hierarchy between investors and founders, and between large corporations and small startups, does not easily disappear. However, at Oktoberfest, everyone sits at long tables together, sharing food and clinking beer steins, which narrows the hierarchy and distance.
That is why I felt that Bits & Pretzels was the most ‘human-centered’ event among the countless startup events I have visited. After the official events, participants continued to talk through the night over beer and wine at after-parties and side events that continued incessantly.
In recent years, news about the European economy has been filled with pessimistic expressions. The crisis of German manufacturing, rising energy prices, declining competitiveness between China and the US, regulatory burdens, lack of venture capital, etc. These problems have not disappeared. However, at this year’s Bits & Pretzels, I saw at least how Europe is trying to find a breakthrough. No matter how much technology advances, it is ultimately people who connect researchers and founders, startups and large companies, and investors and companies.
Founders discussing the most cutting-edge technology in the world sit at long, 200-year-old wooden tables at Oktoberfest on the last day, clinking beer glasses. Perhaps this is the scene that best shows the current state of the European startup ecosystem. To create something new, Europe has started to reconnect the things it was originally good at.
The author, Lee Eun-seo, majored in law in Korea and studied theater in Berlin. Based in Berlin, a city of art and a European startup hub, she leads 123Factory, which connects the Korean and German startup ecosystems while growing alongside the city.