Nico Wägerle is CEO and Co-founder von Certivity.
| Certivity GmbHIt’s a hard life for an engineer. In addition to the actual development work, they have to keep an eye on and implement all kinds of regulations, standards and customer specifications. If the key regulations come in PDF format or as a text file, it takes enormous effort to translate them into practice. That’s because engineering work is increasingly digital. It’s an expensive and error-prone task, as Nico Wägerle knows all too well. The lawyer worked for a major car manufacturer on the regulation of autonomous driving systems in close cooperation with engineers. “We entered the requirements manually in Excel spreadsheets – it was so complex and time-consuming that at a certain point we could no longer justify it legally.”
Especially in areas such as the automotive industry, where safety is so important, new regulations are constantly being introduced. “Keeping track of the requirements is a never-ending task.” Nico Wägerle has set out to simplify things for engineers and make implementation safer. Together with three colleagues, he has founded the startup Certivity, which aims to revolutionize the way regulations are handled.
“We have created a tool that uses artificial intelligence to analyze documents, digitalize them and transfer them to our data model.” This data can be integrated into existing requirements management tools. Engineers no longer have to wade through new standards or amended regulations to check the relevance for their own project, says Wägerle. “If something changes in the regulations, this is automatically transferred to requirements management. Then a message pops up, for example: “This planned test is no longer valid.” Wägerle’s co-founders – a technical engineer and two software engineers – also come from the automotive industry. “We knew that this problem existed in the industry and that we had a business case for our idea.” Certivity therefore initially focused on applications for automotive companies. “We have now proven that our software delivers what we promised,” says Wägerle. “It's already in operation with 10,000 users in all the automotive hotspots worldwide. But we also already have customers from other industries such as aerospace.”
In 2024, Certivity was awarded second place as “Digital Startup of the Year.” This should help with the plans for the near future: “In June, we want to have completed another round of financing in order to further develop our product and, above all, invest in AI so that it can be used in even more fields.”
