Playing to Win: How Nexxa's Philipp Wehn Became an Industrial AI Contender

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When Philipp Wehn first applied to speedrun, he wasn’t entirely clear how to pitch what he was building. He recalls the “one-liner” he included in his application at the time:

“Nexxa is a pioneering process automation platform that applies intelligent reasoning, which enables enterprises to automate the most complex repetitive processes with higher resiliency than existing solutions.”

Looking back at that pitch in a recent conversation with a16z’s Troy Kirwin, Philipp laughed. “I have no idea what that means anymore,” he said.

But Philipp kept building, and by the time he applied for speedrun 005 six months later, his vision for Nexxa was clear: “We build industrial AI agents for operations and heavy industries.” Reading it again now, he says he would only add one word, making them specialized industrial agents.

Finding the focus

A lot happened in those six months. In the fall of 2024, Nexxa was pitching a broad automation platform to CIOs, and Philipp admits it didn’t have much focus. That changed with its first proof of concept, at Siemens, where the workflows that mattered most were ones that, as Philipp put it, “require highly complex, specialized AI systems to solve the problem.”

That first customer helped him make sense of the ten years he’d spent working in industrials. “The entire industrial sphere runs on this,” he said. “90% of the problems are specialized.” By the time he submitted his second application, Nexxa had gone from no traction at all to two pilots and its first signed contract.

Philipp says he changed in that time, too. “I turned from a German founder into an American founder between those applications,” he said.

The ten-minute application

The two applications were also written very differently. Philipp and his co-founder, David Huang (DH), whom he describes as detail-focused, spent about two days trying to make the first one perfect. Around the same time, Philipp was trying to raise a pre-seed round and finding that investors had little interest in industrial AI. “Specialized AI doesn’t scale” was the line he heard most often.

The second application took him about ten minutes. He wrote it after a tennis match, with “no AI tools, no rewrite,” and didn’t really expect to hear back. “I just said: this is who we are, this is what we’re going to do, and this is the proof that we can do it,” Wehn said.

When he looks at the two applications side by side, he sees the difference in himself. “Here I was playing it safe. I was playing not to lose,” he said, pointing to the first app. Then, pointing to the second: “And here, I started to play to win.”

The change was obvious to the a16z team reviewing applications. Troy remembers being struck by how specific the traction section was, down to a specific deal related to lighting that Philipp noted had been “discounted to $50K.” (”I think that’s the German in you,” Troy joked.) The speedrun team called Nexxa’s customers to see what they thought. “They loved the product, they loved you,” Troy told him. And once they met him in person, “it was obvious from the first 60 seconds.”

Getting in meant a great deal to Philipp personally. When he first moved to Silicon Valley four and a half years ago, still on a visa with Siemens, the first thing he did after picking up his rental car was drive to the a16z office on Sand Hill Road to take a picture of the sign. After the speedrun handshake, he and his wife sat together for about an hour trying to take it in, with a young child at home and a second on the way. “I came here as an immigrant and an outsider,” he said, “but this program really made me an insider.”

Things have moved quickly since then. Nexxa has raised close to $20 million and grown to about 30 people across the United States and is now opening an office in Munich. It recently signed a six-figure contract in Austria and added three board advisors: the former CEO of Schaeffler, the former CIO of Boeing and the former chief procurement officer of Airbus. Philipp describes it as “a positive flywheel that started with speedrun.” The hires led to progress, which unlocked more customers.

Nexxa’s advice for other founders

When giving advice to other speedrun founders, Philipp emphasizes focus. “90% of things you can do are BS. 10% matter,” he said, and he credits the program with teaching him how to run “a clean fundraise.” He also learned that there is only “a specific short window” when founders should be spending time on investors, something he got wrong before speedrun. “Investors can deliver rocket fuel when we need it,” he said, “but in order to get to the point of needing it, they are not the best use of a founder’s time.”

As for where AI is headed, Philipp is bullish. “Deployment is the single biggest gap in AI,” he said. “We have made enough progress to deploy for 5–10 years and have a massive impact on humanity. Adoption is the biggest leap we must see.”

That’s it for this week! Thanks to Philipp for sharing his lessons learned with us! Philipp is also a speedrun scout and encourages founders and potential founders to reach out to him at [email protected]. You can also apply to speedrun on our website.

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