Merantix AI 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

• ​Jenny Yang – Stealth Founder, Marie Curie Fellow at Oxford

  • ​Topic TBC

• ​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 Wollman + Rasmus Rothe

​10:15–11:00 — Keynote 1 - “First Principled Suspension of Disbelief”
Jakob Uszkoreit

​11:00–13:00 — Presentations Part 1
Idil Sulo, Deltia, Topic TBD
Jenny Yang, Stealth Venture, Topic TBD
Martin Genzel, Merantix Momentum, "Choose Your Model Size: Any Compression by a Single Gradient Descent"
Philipp Hacker, Europa University, "Regulating Fine-tuning"
Thomas Jarzombek, State Secretary Digital Ministry, "National AI Strategy"

​13:00–14:00 — Lunch Break

​14:00–14:45 — Keynote 2 - "Tutorial on message passing as a probabilistic learning method"
→ Ralf Herbrich, HPI

​14:45–16:45 — Presentations Part 2
Miha, Merantix Momentum, "Deepfake detection"
Xi Chen, Briink, "Integrated feedback collection and evaluation of Briink platform using LangSmith"
Bastian Woidt, revel8,  "How we use Make "
Till Scholich, Ficus, "Autonomy vs. Automation in AI Products"
Sebastian Rämisch, Cambrium, "How we use concept bottleneck models for protein engineering"
Bo Tranberlg, Libra, Libra 2.0

​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!

​— The Merantix Team