Certivity – Combining the legal world with the engineering world

How a success story is born

Take a problem, a legal counsel, a technical regulatory specialist and two software engineers and the drive to innovate. Et voilà: A successful start-up is born.

It is April 2023, it is slightly raining and we are looking for the right entrance. The entrance to Werk 1 in the Werksviertel Munich. We are here to visit Nico Wägerle from Certivity. One message later we are already picked up and Nico leads us through the old factory building and into the Certivity offices, where we are directly welcomed with Persian sweets brought by a team member. Werk 1 is home to many start-ups and the space offers many great opportunities for collaboration. That’s why we chat with Nico in the in-house podcast room and talk about Certivity and his journey as an entrepreneur.

It all started with a problem: how to improve the compliance process in product development?

Throughout the product development process, engineers must always take into account the current rules and regulations. In order to derive the appropriate product requirements, these must be researched and understood. They need to access the regulations and then evaluate them with a legal expert. To make matters worse, these regulations are constantly changing and being updated. Unfortunately, traditional tools such as Excel and such are currently used to deal with this problem.

The Certivity solution: Process Automation in Product Compliance

Certivity provides the automotive industry with a platform that digitises and automates product compliance processes. All of the above steps can now be handled in one tool in a clear and time-saving manner. Manual entries in tables, manual searches and manual reconciliation processes are a thing of the past.

“From a business perspective, we have a clear ambition: to make compliance as easy as possible and as automated as possible. So we dream of a fully automated compliance process, where the underlying system can use AI to assess whether the product you are developing is compliant or not. That is our ambition.”

Nico Wägerle

Co-Founder Certivity

Frustration as a starting point for a business

Having worked as a legal & regulatory counsel in the automotive industry for over seven years, Nico has been directly affected by this issue. Nico worked in the field of autonomous vehicles and was responsible or getting the regulatory requirements. There was a huge amount of regulation that needed to be processed and coordinated with product development and engineers. However, managing this with Excel was a big problem, especially with the constantly changing regulations and the massive amount of data. So Nico had the idea and the desire to find a tool that would automate this process and make it scalable. And if something like that didn’t already exist on the market, why not build it?

So the motto was:

Bye Bye Excel

Nico was not alone in his desire. Bob, a technical regulatory expert, and Sami, a software engineer, worked later at the same company in Munich. Together they met Jörg, also a software engineer, at an accelerator programme in Stuttgart. The spark was immediately lit and the four of them joined forces at Certivity.

Nico describes the founding team as a kind of marriage, where openness and transparency are the keys to success. And that’s what the four of them live by as they work together to drive their company forward. The Certivity team now consists of around 20 people, and Nico couldn’t be prouder of his team.

With this team, Certivity was able to close a seed round of €1,4 million and the interest in Certivity in the industry is huge. The icing on the cake for the start-up was the first customer to subscribe to the tool on an annual basis.

So the Christmas party, which started with the four founders and their partners (some of them remote) in a cosy atmosphere with good food, grew last year into a celebration with more than18 people. This moment, when Nico could thank all these people for their work over the past year, is his highlight as a founder.

We hope for Certivity that these Christmas parties will continue to grow and that there will be even more highlights to celebrate in the years to come!

Want to know more about the founding story?
In our upcoming interview with Nico you can learn more about Certivity and the stumbling blocks on the way to starting a business. So stay tuned.