The Neukölln Founder Taking Berlin's Industrial Tech to Southeast Asian Markets

Katerina Schreiber had a simple problem in 2022: she couldn't get her predictive maintenance software in front of the factory managers who needed it most. Four years later, her company, Ferrolux GmbH, is closing a distribution agreement with a Vietnamese industrial conglomerate worth roughly €4.2 million over three years — signed, according to the company's filing with the Berlin Chamber of Commerce, on June 30. The deal makes Ferrolux one of the more closely watched mid-sized tech exporters to emerge from the German capital in the current trading cycle.

The timing is not incidental. Global supply chain managers are scrambling for stable partnerships after months of compounding disruptions — fuel shortages rippling through Russia, extreme heat events battering European logistics hubs, and the political fog that follows the death of Iran's supreme leader this week. For buyers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a Berlin software firm with a track record in German manufacturing looks, suddenly, like a very safe port. Germany exported €1.6 billion worth of software and IT services to Southeast Asia in 2025, according to Bitkom, the German digital industry association — up 18 percent from the prior year.

From Sonnenallee to Singapore

Schreiber, 38, founded Ferrolux in a shared workspace on Sonnenallee in Neukölln in 2022, with seven engineers and a seed round of €800,000 from the Berlin-based early-stage fund Cavalry Ventures. The product — software that monitors industrial equipment and flags failures before they happen — found its first customers in the metal-processing plants of Brandenburg. But she wanted to grow faster than the German domestic market would allow.

Her route to Asia ran through the German-Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, AHK Vietnam, which operates a Berlin liaison desk at Fasanenstraße 85 in Charlottenburg. Through the AHK network she connected with Indochina Industrial Holdings, the Vietnamese group she is now formally partnering with. The process took 14 months, three in-person visits to Ho Chi Minh City, and a product localization sprint that cost Ferrolux around €120,000 — money the company partially offset through the Senate Department for Economics' Berlin Export Prize program, which awards grants of up to €50,000 to qualifying SMEs.

The German government's broader Germany Trade & Invest agency, which maintains a substantial Berlin office near Potsdamer Platz, flagged Vietnam as a priority market in its 2025 SME export strategy. Manufacturing investment in Vietnam grew by 22 percent in 2025, driven largely by electronics and automotive suppliers relocating or expanding out of southern China. That movement created an immediate demand for the kind of plant-floor software that companies like Ferrolux have been refining for German clients for years.

What the Deal Actually Requires

The agreement is not a handshake arrangement. Indochina Industrial Holdings will embed Ferrolux software across six production facilities, starting with a textile machinery plant in Biên Hòa province in Q3 2026. Ferrolux must provide on-site training — two Berlin engineers will be based in Vietnam for 90 days starting in August — and maintain a local-language customer support line, for which it is hiring two Vietnamese-speaking engineers currently enrolled at Technische Universität Berlin.

The company's next challenge is replicability. Schreiber has been in contact with the Indonesia desk of the AHK network and is in early-stage talks with a Philippine industrial group through Advantage Austria, which shares a trade house on Kurfürstendamm with the Austrian chamber. Whether Vietnam becomes a template or a one-off depends largely on whether Ferrolux can deliver the Biên Hòa rollout without the delays that have sunk similar mid-sized German tech exports before.

For other Berlin founders watching Ferrolux, the practical lesson is infrastructure: neither the Senate export grant nor the AHK introductions would have moved without the company first meeting the EU Cybersecurity Act's EUCS framework compliance requirements — a box many Berlin startups have not yet ticked. Schreiber began that compliance process in January 2025. It cost eight months and around €60,000 in legal and audit fees. It also, she has told associates, made every subsequent conversation with Asian corporate buyers significantly shorter.