paul burkhardt

I build AI that does the work. Building Tent with my cofounder Mustafa. We don't sell software, we sell work.

I'm building Tent with my cofounder Mustafa. Everyone wants AI, nobody wants to change how they work. So we stopped building tools and started replacing the work itself.

Western societies are heading into demographic change: fewer workers, same amount of work. This is how I want to tackle it. I dropped out of my M.Sc. at TUM and UC Berkeley (3/4 done, top 2%) to build Tent full-time. I've been deep in AI agents since 2023 and trying new models and frameworks as soon as I can get my hands on them.
2025 ~

Tent

Cofounder & CTO

We enter companies, map processes end-to-end, and deploy AI agents that own them. Not software, work. Currently running pilots, selling output not seats.

Jun ~ Aug 2024

Knowunity · Series B

AI Backend Engineering Intern

End-to-end AI product engineering for 2M weekly active users. Built RAG pipelines, custom models, and image embedding infrastructure. Took over backend engineering for the US team rollout. Did everything from product specs and AI experiments to shipping in the app.

Apr ~ May 2024

BCG Platinion

Visiting Associate

Helped scale the tech organization at a growing IoT unicorn. Saw firsthand how scaleup ops run, and how much of it could be automated. Validated the conviction behind Tent.

Aug ~ Dec 2023

Adago

Working Student, Cloud & Software Engineering

Built the AWS infrastructure (Batch, S3, Lambda, Aurora) powering an ML-driven digital twin for a DAX40 client. End-to-end ownership from Palantir Foundry data pipelines to production deployment.

Feb ~ Apr 2023

Langfuse · YC W23, acquired by ClickHouse

Founding Intern (Employee #1)

First employee at the LLM observability startup. Shipped full-stack features (Next.js, React, tRPC) during the product-market fit phase. Now 20K+ GitHub stars, 26M+ monthly SDK installs.

2024 ~ 2025

TU Munich & UC Berkeley

M.Sc. Computer Science · GPA 1.2 German (~3.8 US)
ML, Computer Vision, Systems Design, Foundation Models
Left after 3/4 to build Tent full-time · Top 2%
Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes · Rohde Stiftung · Adam Haker Stiftung
2024 ~

CDTM

Honors Degree in Technology Management · GPA 1.1 German (~3.9 US)
~4% acceptance rate
2020 ~ 2024

University of Mannheim & NUS

B.Sc. Information Systems · GPA 1.2 German (~3.8 US)
Top 2% · Deutschlandstipendium Scholar

Opus

AI-powered workforce platform automating HR, customer support, and analytics via Slack and email integration. Built with Mustafa in 48 hours.

AI Agentsn8nReactSupabaseVAPI

PathPilot

Computer vision system for visually impaired navigation. Uses Mast3r-SLAM, SAM, YOLO, and BLIP for dense 3D reconstruction, collision detection, instance segmentation, and object tracking to provide real-time auditory guidance for obstacle avoidance.

PythonPyTorchComputer Vision3D Reconstruction

Auto-Toon

AI app that generates personalized comic books where kids are the main character in their own story. Built it for my nephew, now his friends love it too.

Next.jsAI Image GenerationVercel
Winner, CDTM Hacks
Opus: AI workforce platform (with Mustafa)
Winner, Q-Summit Hackathon
AWS challenge, beat 50+ teams (with Mustafa)
Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
Germany's most prestigious merit-based scholarship (top 0.5%)
Deutschlandstipendium, Rohde Stiftung, Adam Haker Stiftung
National and university merit-based scholarships