Merantix vs Improbable

Neither company has publicly disclosed a valuation, making a definitive size comparison difficult. Merantix employs 100-500 people, while Improbable has 500-1000 employees.

Improbable has raised more in total funding at $700M, compared to Merantix's $30M — a gap of $670M. Combined, the two companies have completed 5 known funding rounds.

Improbable leads with an Awaira Score of 68/100, while Merantix sits at 50/100. That 18-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Merantix was founded by Adrian Locher in 2016. Improbable was founded by Herman Narula in 2012. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Merantix: Merantix operates as an AI venture studio and holding company, building and investing in applied AI businesses across healthcare, mobility, and enterprise verticals from its Berlin base. The company model combines internal company building through its Merantix AI Campus with minority stakes in portfolio AI companies, acting as both an operator and an investor in the Berlin AI ecosystem.\n\nThe company raised approximately $30 million in venture funding and has built multiple AI ventures including Vara, an AI mammography screening tool, and Merantix Momentum, an enterprise machine learning platform for industrial and logistics applications. Merantix operates the AI Campus Berlin, a physical hub for AI researchers and companies that has become one of Germany most active technology community spaces, hosting events and providing shared infrastructure for AI development teams.\n\nMerantix occupies a distinctive position in the German AI ecosystem as one of the few organisations combining venture studio operations with a physical AI campus model. The company competes with AI labs and applied AI consultancies for talent and clients while differentiating through equity-aligned co-building arrangements that align its interests with portfolio company success. Germany position as Europe largest economy and its strength in industrial and automotive sectors create a substantial home market for AI applications in manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, sectors that Merantix portfolio companies target directly. Improbable: Improbable develops large-scale simulation technology and virtual world infrastructure, originally focused on cloud-distributed game server simulation and subsequently pivoting to AI-powered synthetic environment generation and metaverse platform development. The London company built SpatialOS, a cloud platform for running distributed simulations of large, persistent virtual worlds, and has applied simulation capabilities to defence, urban planning, and entertainment applications.\n\nThe company raised approximately $700 million including a landmark $502 million SoftBank round in 2017 that was one of the largest venture rounds in European technology history. Improbable has undergone multiple strategic pivots, moving from gaming infrastructure to defence simulation contracts with clients including the UK Ministry of Defence, which uses simulation environments for training and wargaming. The company also built MSquared, a metaverse interoperability network, before refocusing on defence and AI simulation work.\n\nImprobable operates in an AI simulation market where demand from defence agencies, autonomous vehicle companies, and robotics firms has grown substantially. The company competes with simulation platforms from Epic Games (Unreal Engine), NVIDIA (Omniverse), and specialist defence simulation vendors. Its SoftBank backing and large cash reserves have enabled it to survive multiple market pivot cycles that would have ended less well-funded companies, and its current focus on AI-powered synthetic data generation for defence represents a growing government budget category.

Improbable got there first, launching in 2012 — that's 4 years of extra runway. Merantix didn't arrive until 2016. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Merantix has about 100-500 employees; Improbable has about 500-1000. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Merantix and Improbable compete in ML Platform, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.