Fenja Vespermann — Why enterprise AI fails, working with Audi & Adidas, the cringe rule

Fenja Vespermann is the co-founder and CEO of mimikry AI — a Hamburg-based studio building custom AI pipelines for enterprise creative production. In less than a year, she's worked with Audi, Adidas, and Otto Group. Without raising a single euro.Before mimikry, Fenja ran her own 3D animation agency. Then Corona hit, the studio closed, and she borrowed 15K from a friend to start over.In this conversation we discuss:🔹 How she landed Audi, Meta, and Otto Group as a one-year-old bootstrapped company🔹 Why she refuses to raise — "scale the money, not the people"🔹 Her contrarian thesis: there is no AI tool, AI is just a technology🔹 The night her studio shut down and she called her mom to say "I have no idea what to do"🔹 Being mistaken for the PM, not the CEOTimestamps:(00:00) Intro(02:30) Why most enterprise AI deployments fail(06:10) "There is no AI tool — AI is just a technology"(08:00) Origin story: 3D animation, Corona, the studio shutting down(10:00) Borrowing 15K and getting into Midjourney's beta(17:00) Why standardizing client data is 40% of the work(19:00) Landing Audi, Meta, Otto Group, BMW, and Replit in year one(21:00) "Get over the cringe" — the go-to-market(24:30) Europe vs America: speed and risk appetite(28:30) Why Mimikry refuses to raise(30:00) "Stay as small as possible. Scale the money, not the people."(31:00) How an AI-native company actually works (ComfyUI, Claude Code)(33:30) VibeCon NYC and the Replit installation(40:40) Being a female CEO in a room full of menFind Fenja: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fenjavespermannFind mimikry AI: https://www.mimikry.aiCheck out found:Newsletter: https://www.foundhamburg.comKyrylo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyrylokorsunHugo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugopaquin