My Bid Idea: AI work agent Flip

Hi Benedikt! What's your elevator pitch?

Flip is the AI-powered, agentic operating system for frontline work. We give every employee, whether or not they have a desk, a laptop, or a company email address, secure digital access to the apps, information, and AI tools their job requires. One app, one login, one place where the workforce connects with the business.

Why does the market need it?

Most people underestimate just how many workers this problem affects. Roughly 80% of the global workforce doesn't sit at a desk. That's around 2.7 billion people in manufacturing, retail, logistics, healthcare, and hospitality. Enterprise software was not built for them.

The tools knowledge workers take for granted, identity platforms, productivity apps, AI assistants, almost all require a corporate email address, a personal device, and a reliable broadband connection. Frontline workers rarely have any of those. Hence you end up with shared passwords, printed PIN lists, and paper-based workflows. That’s a growing divide between the part of the company that's been digitised and the part that hasn't right there. That's the gap we're closing.

Where is the business today?

More than 1,000 brands use Flip, reaching over two million frontline workers worldwide. Some of our most important customers include Bosch, REWE Group, FORVIA HELLA, APCOA, and Greif. Greif is a good benchmark for what happens when you get this right. Their initial pilot in a factory in Warminster hit 85% adoption, sustained 74% weekly active users, and earned a 4.3 out of 5 user satisfaction score. They've since rolled Flip out to over 100 sites across 15 countries.

We have 200+ employees with offices in Germany, the UK, and the US. In August 2026, we announced $25 million in new funding from Notion Capital and HV Capital, with L-Bank joining as a new investor alongside business angels and institutional investors.

What made you think there was money in this?

I kept seeing the same thing when working with large organisations: enormous investments in digital transformation that stopped at the factory floor or the shop entrance. The ERP went in. The collaboration tools went in. The AI assistant went in. And then nothing. The people actually running operations were still on WhatsApp groups, printed shift schedules, and handwritten forms.

Enterprise software had been built almost entirely by people who work at desks, for people who work at desks. That struck me as both a genuine problem and a genuine opportunity.

The commercial case became clearer the more customers we talked to. Frontline turnover in retail and logistics regularly runs at 30 to 60% per year. Companies were desperate for tools that could improve retention, streamline onboarding, and give employees a real connection to the business. The demand was there.

And the competition? Most of what existed was desk-based software awkwardly adapted for frontline use. The user experience showed it. The pricing showed it. The activation rates showed it. We built for the frontline from day one, and that changes everything.

What's your biggest strength?

Our competitors are mostly enterprise software vendors who adapted desk-based tools for frontline use. That means complexity designed for IT administrators, pricing built around corporate email licenses, and user experiences that assume employees have 20 minutes to figure out a new system.

We built Flip from scratch for someone who has seven minutes between shifts, no corporate email, a shared device, and no patience for software that doesn't work immediately. That constraint turned out to be a discipline. It makes the product better.

Our Frontline Identity solution is a direct result of that. It gives every operational employee a secure, personal digital credential, activated via passkey, QR code, or invite code, with no external identity provider and no corporate email required. Products like Microsoft Entra work well for office workers. For a warehouse operative or a care home nurse, they're too complex, too expensive, and simply the wrong tool.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Getting the identity layer right.

You can build the most compelling frontline application in the world. If employees can't reliably log in, nothing else matters. And "reliably log in" means something very different for a frontline worker than it does for a knowledge worker. Passkeys instead of passwords. QR code activation instead of email verification. Shared devices instead of personal laptops.

Once you solve identity access management properly, the rest follows naturally. AI agents become useful because they already know who the worker is and what systems they're allowed to access. Custom applications can be deployed because the permission structure is already in place. Workflows can be automated because the identity layer can trigger them.

I think, in the end, you cannot solve any surface-level problems without attacking foundational ones. That takes longer. It's harder to explain to investors early on.

How do you market the company?

We focus on outcomes, not features. When we talk to HR leaders, we talk about retention and onboarding. With IT teams, it's security and compliance. With operation teams, it's process efficiency and the cost of paper-based workflows that convinces them.

The frontline AI category is genuinely new territory, and that creates both an opportunity and a challenge. There's no established buying committee for "AI platform for frontline workers." So we invest heavily in category education: conferences, thought leadership, customer stories, and direct conversations with the people living this problem.

Our Forward conference in Frankfurt in June 2026 is a good example. We brought together 200 senior HR, IT, and Internal Communications leaders for a day of product launches and real customer case studies. That kind of direct engagement is very crucial.

Referrals and reputation matter more than ranking on Google. When Greif rolls Flip out to 100 sites across 15 countries, that story travels in the right circles. The best marketing we have is a customer who couldn't go back to the old way.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

We closed $25 million in August 2026. Notion Capital and HV Capital led the round. Both have been with us since 2022 and have watched the business grow through each major product milestone. L-Bank, the development bank of Baden-Württemberg, joined our backers alongside a group of angels and institutional investors.

Is it enough? Any founder who says yes to that question is either not ambitious enough or not being honest with you. The market opportunity here is vast. We'll need continued capital to expand in the UK and US, deepen the product, and build the partnerships the platform requires. But this round gives us a clear runway against clear priorities, and we're deploying it with discipline.

Tell us about the business model

We're a SaaS business, now fully AI-native. Customers pay per user, per month, as a platform license plus a credit-based model for AI solutions. Frontline Identity is available as a modular add-on, with volume discounts at scale.

And, of course our market is pretty large, as we are serving a huge frontline workforce. A manufacturer with 10,000 production employees is not a small deal. And because our tools drive measurable outcomes, lower turnover, faster onboarding, better compliance, the return on investment case is easy to make.

Our cost base is primarily people and infrastructure. We run a focused team and invest heavily in product. We're in a growth phase, deploying capital to build the market position the opportunity demands. Profitability is the direction of travel. Market leadership is the near-term priority.

What were you doing before?

I came from strategy and technology roles across consulting and industry, including as a project manager at Porsche. What those experiences gave me was a clear view of how large organisations actually operate, and specifically the gap between what the boardroom believes is happening digitally and what's happening on the factory floor or in the store.

We spent a long time talking to HR and IT leaders in manufacturing, retail, and logistics before we wrote a single line of code. The consistent finding wasn't that organisations were unaware of the problem. It was that nothing credible existed to solve it. That told us the opportunity was real.

Are there any technologies you've found useful?

Passkeys have been genuinely transformative for us. The FIDO2 standard lets us offer biometric authentication on personal or shared devices, without passwords and without a corporate email address. We were early adopters for the frontline context, and it's proven to be the right call.

On the AI side, Model Context Protocol (MCP) has unlocked a new layer of capability for our AI Agent Gateway. The ability to connect a frontline AI assistant to live enterprise systems, SAP, Workday, Salesforce, via standardised, governed protocols is something that simply didn't exist two years ago. It's the technical foundation that makes AI for frontline workers more than a marketing claim.

What is the future vision?

We want AI to leave no employee behind. That's not a slogan.

AI is improving productivity for desk-based workers fast. For the majority of the global workforce, it's not arriving at all. That gap has real consequences: for worker pay, for career progression, for job security, and for the businesses that depend on operational excellence to compete.

We want to close that gap with Flip. We're building the identity layer, the application layer, and the AI agent layer that frontline work requires. In five years, I want a nurse, a warehouse operative, and a store associate to have the same quality of digital access, and the same ability to benefit from AI, as their desk-based colleagues. That's a big ambition. But we are able to solve that infrastructure problem. The funding, the product, and the customer momentum are all pointing in the same direction.