Founding History

Matthias and Karl founded Ostrom in December 2020 with the aim of upending the German energy market.

The idea originated from Matthias while consulting energy companies at Oliver Wyman. After realizing how bureaucratic and outdated the processes were—like 90% offline marketing budgets and extremely manual backend processes—he decided to move on to create a better energy utility for Germany.

Karl joined several weeks later to support user acquisition and UX. After experience in several B2C startups and joining the Berlin cohort of Entrepreneur First, he was looking to found a startup of his own.

After a development period, they released an early MVP in May 2021. Within only a few months, Ostrom provided green electricity for several customers while the team continued refining its product and operations.