Interview: Jakob Freund, the quiet founder behind software that banks run on

Camunda’s co-founder and CEO on bootstrapping in a city without a startup scene, learning to lead without pleasing everyone, and the day he broke down after a layoff call

When Jakob Freund was 12, he read a Bill Gates biography and decided what he wanted to become. It was 1991, Microsoft Windows 3.0 had just come out, and Gates was the most famous software entrepreneur in the world. The boy in Berlin wanted to be just like him.

More than three decades later, Freund is just that. Camunda, which he co-founded in 2008, coordinates business processes for banks, insurers and manufacturers. Audi uses it to see which suppliers are affected when low water levels threaten a shipping route. US banking giant Goldman Sachs is another user of the software.

The Berlin-based company is closing in on $200m in annual recurring revenue, and around a year ago it offered staff the chance to sell shares at a valuation of just over €1bn.

Yet the name rings few bells. “Most people have never heard of us,” says Freund. “We still have to fight for every single piece of attention, and for every deal.” That is partly by design.

He grew up in Berlin, the son of a lawyer who ran her own practice and a teacher. His father had a computer at home, and by the age of eight or nine, Freund was teaching himself to program on it. So, when the Gates biography came along, the ground was already prepared. “I’m afraid the answer is a bit sad,” he says of his childhood ambition. “I wanted to be a software entrepreneur.”

He doesn’t pretend money played no part. “Even as a kid, I liked the idea of having a lot of money, if I’m honest. When I saw a big villa, I thought, I’d love to own one of those one day.” But what really pulled him in was the adventure of building something. “It’s a bit like Lord of the rings – a small party on a quest, going through all those adventures together,” he says. “Not knowing whether you will succeed is part of it, and so are the moments when it all works out.”

How not to build a company

He studied Wirtschaftsinformatik, a German blend of computer science and business administration, at what is now HTW Berlin, and stumbled on business process management along the way.

“For someone who’s not a hardcore software developer but still has an engineering mindset, it’s super interesting to think about how organisations can be codified,” he says.

Freund wanted his own business, but didn’t yet know what it should be, so he played it safe and took two jobs as an employee, both close to the topic.

But both left him disappointed. Managers didn’t inspire or empower their people, and the culture felt rigid, dry and without energy. “The first thing I learned there was how not to build a company,” he says, although he is quick to call them decent employers.

What struck him most was the bragging at one of them. People kept telling each other they had the greatest product and that competitors knew nothing. “You need a certain confidence, of course – it’s a competitive market,” he says. “But it was too cocky. You keep telling yourself how great you are, and you overlook your weaknesses.”

As consultants, we saw room for a product that was far better than anything on the market

It was a lesson he took to heart. “When people talk about Camunda, I believe they describe our culture as a bit humbler,” he says. “Not as loud.” That has its price, he admits. A company that doesn’t shout is rarely in the news.

Still employed, he ran a community website on business process management on the side and went looking for authors. Around 2007, on the German business network Xing, he came across Bernd Rücker, a freelancer in Stuttgart, and asked him to write about Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a process standard listed in his profile. “He came back and said, ‘You know what? BPEL is crap, I’m not going to write about that, but I can write about something else’,” Freund recalls. It was sassy, he says, but also opinionated and profound – and he liked it.

When Freund was ready to start for real, he emailed Rücker, who invited him to Stuttgart. They were both in their late twenties. In the afternoon, they sat down to work out how a consultancy around business process management could work.

“We were really feeding off each other, developing those ideas,” he says. “But in the evening, we went out for dinner, then for drinks, then clubbing and dancing.” They got home at about three in the morning, and that is when they decided to do it together.

Camunda was founded in 2008. A year later, the two wrote a book on Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), the standard for drawing business processes as flowcharts that software can also run. Published by Hanser, and later in English as Real-life BPMN, it sold in the thousands and gave the young consultancy its credibility.

• Listen to this podcast, where we speak to Jakob Freund, CEO of Camunda,
  about how business processes are being reinvented in the age of agentic AI

Learning to lead

For five years, they ran a bootstrapped consultancy of 10 to 15 people as co-CEOs, making every major decision together. Rücker, the more technical of the two, focused on that side of the work. Freund calls himself “the bridge between tech and business”.

It worked, until it didn’t. “When two people make decisions together, you always have to check in, you have to debate,” says Freund. “You often don’t see eye to eye right away, so it takes longer to reach consensus, and people aren’t sure who to ask.”

The solution came from their different strengths. “Bernd loves working with people, but he doesn’t love managing them, whereas I felt a natural pull towards that. So, I became the sole CEO, the one who can call the shots quickly and is accountable for them, and Bernd became our evangelist, our free radical, if you will. He’s hyper-productive, he has written three or four books by now. He’s in his zone of genius, and so am I. But we had to figure that out.”

The company was changing too. “As consultants, we saw room for a product that was far better than anything on the market.” The market belonged to the big suppliers, and the two founders believed they could develop something lighter, more developer-friendly and truer to BPMN. In 2013, they forked Activiti, an open source project they had been contributing to, and turned Camunda into a software company, with an open source product and a commercial edition on top. Almost immediately, they started rebuilding the workflow engine from scratch. It would take them about 10 years.

When the new generation, Camunda 8, was finally ready, it came with a different licence. “Releasing it as open source was a risk we couldn’t afford. The hyperscalers could simply take it, commercialise it and compete with us.” MongoDB and Elastic had moved away from open source licences for the same reason.

Part of the community did not appreciate it, and several companies took the code of the old version, Camunda 7, to build their own, much as Camunda had once done with Activiti. “That was fine,” says Freund. “We fully expected it. In a situation like that, you have to choose between playing defence and playing offence.” Defence would have meant worrying about the customers the old version might cost them. Offence meant looking at the 100,000 customers the new version could win, he adds.

A venture across the ocean

For its first decade, Camunda took no outside money. Partly because there simply wasn’t a startup scene in Berlin to speak of, and the founders had never set out to build a high-growth startup in the first place. But there was also prejudice. “We thought venture capitalists were greedy and pushy,” he says. “In hindsight, that was just bias. It wasn’t well informed.”

That all changed in 2014. A fellow entrepreneur told him about a German economics ministry programme that helped German companies break into the US, and Freund moved to San Francisco with his family for three months. It turned out to be a pivotal moment. He saw how venture-backed companies worked, met the people funding them, and came home with a simple insight: “Oh, they’re actually human.”

Even so, he did not let just anyone in. When London-based Highland Europe sent a cold email, he replied with questions, as he did to every investor wanting a call. Highland answered them in writing, thoroughly. “I felt that with them, I could have profound conversations,” he says. “They weren’t pushy, and they listened.”

Highland Europe became Camunda’s first investor in 2018, and Insight Partners followed in 2021. Freund wanted partners with skin in the game, people who could show him how to build an international software company.

Much of that venture money is still in the bank. “We have always operated pretty efficiently, so we never actually needed it.” They raised it anyway, partly because the terms in 2021 were favourable, and partly to have funds ready for a possible acquisition. That acquisition never came, and the money stayed where it was.

Around a year ago, Camunda found a use for it. Employees could sell back up to a third of their vested shares, at a valuation of just over €1bn. “Some of them wanted to cash out a bit, to buy their first home, for instance,” he says. “They had put in a lot of hard work.”

But there was a third reason, and Freund finds it the most interesting one. The shares are virtual, tracking the company’s value without being actual stock, because real employee equity is hard to arrange in Europe. To many staff, the whole concept felt alien, and they had no idea whether it would ever be worth anything. “Putting hard cash into their hands made it real.”

Out of office experience

Getting staff to believe in their shares was one thing. Getting them to let go of the office was far harder. For 10 years, Freund insisted that everyone came to the office, every day. Then Camunda began hiring in the US, and those new colleagues ended up outside the loop, cut off from how decisions were made.

Around 2018, he pushed for remote working and ran into a wall of resistance. “In early 2020, I was close to giving up,” he says. “I thought, ‘This is an in-person company, let’s not pick that battle’.” Two months later, the pandemic hit, and everyone was forced to work remotely. When his old role model Bill Gates wrote in April 2020 that he believed Covid would be around for a year or two, Freund decided to turn lemons into lemonade and go fully remote for good.

That decision changed more than where people work. “Formally, we’re a very traditional German company,” says Freund. “A GmbH in Berlin, with Bernd and me as personal shareholders and no holding company in between. Old-fashioned, in a way.”

The Berlin office tells a different story. Hardly anyone goes there – five people on a busy day, while around 200 of the more than 650 staff are spread across the US and the rest live wherever they happen to live.

“We’re not a German company anymore, but we’re not becoming an American company either. I care about Europe a lot, personally. But we’re an international company.” It also makes for an interesting blend of work cultures, he adds.

In the early days, how hard people should work was barely a question. “We started the company more or less as a lifestyle business. The product was interesting, so let’s do this. It was all a bit light-hearted.” But as Camunda grew, so did its ambition, and with it the sense that the company would have to lean in to get there. That meant hiring for talent and ability, raising the bar on performance and, at times, putting work ahead of other things in life.

It is an emotionally charged topic, he admits, and nowhere more so than between Europe and the US. “I’m hearing from many in the startup ecosystem that you cannot build successful companies in Europe,” he says, “because of labour laws in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and a culture where people clock out at five and go on holiday for six weeks a year.” With roughly as many staff in the US as in Europe, Freund sees that clash play out in his own organisation.

“For us as a company, but also for Europe as an ecosystem, the question is what our path is. Where do you have to do what it takes, and what are the values we want to stick to?” He doesn’t have a ready answer.

At Camunda itself, the bar has gone up over the past 10 years, and not without pain. Asked where it hurt most, he doesn’t hesitate. “Glassdoor. Seriously.” Some staff aired their frustration in all-hands calls and engagement surveys. Others went public: “Things used to be great” and “the CEO has no idea what he is doing”. For a long time, Freund took that personally and tried to keep everybody happy – until he made a conscious decision to stop.

“My priority is not to make everybody happy. My priority is to provide clarity, so people know what they are signing up for, not just when they join, but also when they stay. These are the expectations, this is what you get out of it, and then we have a deal.”

Big lessons in leadership

Criticism itself still stings. “In the moment, I can become very defensive,” he admits. “Then it takes me a couple of hours, and I come back and say: ‘You know what, I think you were right’.” This happens when the criticism comes from someone who really understands the business and offers an angle he hadn’t considered. “That’s when I think, ‘I would never have looked at it that way’.”

Nothing compares with letting people go, though. “Those were the most difficult times.” Four or five years ago, Camunda had to cut roles, and Freund decided to make the calls himself. “I felt responsible, and I didn’t want to dodge the bullet.” What made those conversations so hard was that there was nobody to blame. “I had to tell people, ‘It’s not because of your performance, it’s not your fault, it’s ours. But you have to go’.” Some took it well enough. Others were very upset.

One young employee went quiet with shock, and then asked whether he had to return his laptop. Normally, people do. “We told him he could keep it, and he said, ‘Wow, thank you’,” Freund recalls. “That moment broke me. I got through the call, but then I burst into tears.”

Many startups hit a nerve and ride a wave. That takes a lot of skill, and I respect it. But we were never on any of those waves, not once

It is the part of leadership he still finds hardest. His biggest lesson as CEO, he says, has been learning to make big things happen through other people, rather than doing everything himself. “As a founder, you’re so used to just doing it yourself. To this day, I find it incredibly difficult to have hard debates with the people I manage, because I don’t know if I’m right.”

Interestingly, artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to help with exactly that. Whether someone is underperforming or the circumstances were simply against them is hard to prove, and the data is hard to read, but AI makes that easier, he says. He has also found it a surprisingly good sparring partner on how to be a better leader.

“When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, it was fun to have it write poems. What we have now changes the game completely.” More broadly, Camunda runs itself AI-first. Freund’s own entry point is Claude Code: he puts a question to it, and it goes off into Slack, Google Drive and wherever else, connecting the dots and coming back with answers he finds sound, even on strategic decisions.

That is also what unsettles him. At Camunda, people already manage AI agents that do work for them. “But I think we are close to the point where agents start managing us,” he says. “Where they give us tasks and assess our performance.” He expects to see it as early as 2027, and he isn’t sure where the line should be. “Where do we hand that sense of authority to an AI?”

When asked which technology he would rather see disappear, his first answer is “AI”. It feels, he says, as if we are all children playing with fire, excited that it burns, until we can no longer control it. Then he reconsiders. Time will tell whether humanity can organise itself to manage that risk, as it has had to with nuclear weapons. What actually worries him more is short-form video, from TikTok to YouTube Shorts, and what it does to children.

Relying on perseverance and growth

Where all this is heading, Freund finds incredibly hard to predict. What he does know is what he still wants for himself. “I’m excited by personal growth, and I feel I’m still growing as a leader.” It is the people side of the job that keeps him going, even though it asks the most of him. “What you do should give you energy, and you constantly have to find that balance. Maybe that’s really the thing I still want to figure out.”

What he is proudest of is that Camunda became a healthy company without simply being in the right place at the right time. “Many startups hit a nerve and ride a wave. That takes a lot of skill, and I respect it. But we were never on any of those waves, not once.” Instead, the company kept reinventing itself: from consultancy to software, from office to remote, from an old engine to a new one, and now towards AI. What carried it through, he says, was the team.

And perseverance. And grit. He also needs both for the two goals he has set himself outside work: learning to play the guitar and learning to surf. “In both cases, I have zero talent. I just enjoy persevering and trying again. That in itself is fun.