START pod: Nikolas Keller, CEO & Co-Founder, Walter "AI Employee for Manufacturing Operations"

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In many cases, the best AI companies aren't replacing software. They're giving it a login.

Every software company for years has made the same pitch to manufacturers: clean APIs, migrate your stack, rip out your ERP.

It rarely works well.

The ERP is the company brain. Years of data.

You can't rip it out any more than you can rip out someone's memory.

Nikolas Keller & Co-Founder Lukas Postulka figured out the obvious thing that everyone missed

Stop trying to replace the software.

Give an AI employee a login instead.

Walter (YC P26) signs into SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Oracle the way a new hire would.

Ready to go from day 1.

Works out of Teams and email like the rest of the team.

Reads orders. Enters them. Places supplier POs. Catches pricing errors before they ship...

Not another dashboard. Not another integration project. Not another rip and replace.

A purchase order that used to take 15 minutes now takes a few seconds.

The insight came from a $109M manufacturer who had a full-time employee doing nothing but typing purchase orders into an ERP

Not because the work was valuable. Because the software demanded it.

With Walter, your software stays. The manual work disappears.

🎙️ Nikolas Keller, CEO & Co-Founder of Walter (YC P26) on Fondo START (Full ep in comments)

02:02 Growing up across Beijing, Zurich, Munich, and Singapore
02:53 Walking into French restaurants asking for a job
04:10 Why he walked away from the Michelin-star path
04:48 Choosing startups because uncertainty was the point
05:25 Flying to San Francisco with a duffel bag
06:18 Getting rejected, then forcing his way into a startup
07:06 Learning software engineering and customer discovery
08:00 Meeting future co-founder Lukas Pistoor
09:00 Lukas' bias toward action and unconventional journey
10:16 Discovering the manufacturing workflow problem
10:48 Selling Walter before the product existed
11:26 Why AI employees work where ERP replacements fail
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visit www.walter.one to learn more