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 CEO

Timestamps:

(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 men

Find Fenja: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fenjavespermann

Find mimikry AI: https://www.mimikry.ai

Check out found:

Newsletter: https://www.foundhamburg.com

Kyrylo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyrylokorsun

Hugo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugopaquin