The artificial intelligence market right now is a beast with two very different heads. On one side, you have the heavy, metallic reality of companies actually trying to build things you can touch. Take a look at Richtech Robotics Inc. They are sitting on the NASDAQ under the ticker RR, trading at around $1.98 at the close of June. They aren’t selling digital dreams; they operate in the industrials and machinery sector, pushing what is called embodied AI. They take proprietary artificial intelligence models, train them on their own in-house data, and literally put them into robotic systems that have to survive in the real world. We are talking about machines doing the dirty work in food service, retail, industrial manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, and hospitality. Richtech doesn’t rely on abstract subscription models for their bread and butter. The vast majority of their revenue comes straight from hardware sales—moving physical robotic products alongside some data services. You build the hardware, you sell it outright. It’s straightforward, brutal commerce.
Then you flip the coin and look at the software side, where the numbers start to sound completely detached from reality, yet the money is very real. Over in Berlin, a startup named Peec AI is currently negotiating a funding round that could push their valuation to an insane 200 million dollars, according to the tech outlet Sifted. What do they actually do? They optimize content so that AI applications can find it. The game we all used to call SEO on Google has mutated. Now it’s GEO—Generative Engine Optimization.
The Numbers Behind the Hype
Peec AI only just hit the scene in 2025. The founders—Tobias Siwonia, Marius Meiners, and Daniel Drabo—crossed paths at the venture capital firm Antler. In this specific slice of the tech world, everybody measures their pulse by ARR, the annual recurring revenue from subscriptions. A darling of the industry like Langdock is sitting comfortably at 40 million dollars ARR. Peec AI is currently pulling in a quarter of that, claiming 10 million dollars ARR. Make no mistake, that is still a massive pile of cash for a company fresh out of the gate.
The investors are practically salivating. A partner at Singular VC told Handelsblatt they expect Peec AI to completely dominate the market for small and medium-sized enterprises, boldly predicting they belong among the next German AI unicorns. And clearly, even a 200 million dollar valuation isn’t enough to satisfy the current market appetite.
But here is the thing that really grounds this whole story, something we on the Balkans understand on a fundamental level. Before the massive valuations and the unicorn talk, there is the grind. During the early days of building Peec AI, Marius Meiners lived a notoriously cheap lifestyle and dropped a piece of advice that hits pretty close to home: if you find yourself in a phase where you have to survive on €1.99 cevapcici for a few months, just hold out. Things can change much faster than you think. Whether you are welding robots for the hospitality sector or tweaking generative algorithms, sometimes the foundation of a multimillion-dollar tech empire is just a cheap pack of minced meat and the sheer, stubborn refusal to quit.