Oliver Merkel isn't done building in Berlin.
Less than three years after stepping back from Flink, the quick-commerce company he co-founded that raised roughly $750 million in venture capital, Merkel has secured $6 million in pre-seed funding for his newest venture. Blocks, a cloud cost optimization platform, promises something that might sound too good to be true in the cautious world of enterprise software: guaranteed savings of at least 20% on Amazon Web Services bills.
Speedinvest, the Vienna-based firm with a reputation for spotting early European winners, led the round announced April 10, 2026, with Munich's caesar joining alongside a constellation of familiar names. The Flixbus trio—Jochen Engert, André Schwämmlein, and Daniel Krauss—are in. So is Mario Götze, the footballer who scored Germany's World Cup-winning goal in 2014 and has quietly assembled a portfolio of tech bets. It's the kind of investor lineup that suggests people are backing Merkel as much as they're backing the idea.
Pooling to Punch Above Weight
The pitch is straightforward, if ambitious. Blocks layers AI-driven optimization atop a more unconventional mechanism: aggregated purchasing power. By pooling demand across dozens of customers, the Berlin startup aims to unlock the kind of volume discounts on AWS that typically go to enterprises with massive cloud footprints—then pass those savings downstream to the startups and scale-ups that need them most.
At the center sits an AI agent the team has named "Major Tom" (a nod, perhaps, to the David Bowie classic or the more recent Chris Hadfield cover that went viral). Major Tom analyzes usage patterns in real time, pushing recommendations straight into Slack channels where engineers actually live. It's a pragmatic choice—nobody wants to log into yet another dashboard.
Merkel and his co-founder, Dr. Andreas Schroeter, incorporated Blocks Holding GmbH last April. The platform, they claim, can hook into an AWS account in under 60 seconds. Speed matters when you're trying to convince budget-conscious CTOs to let you peek under the hood of their cloud infrastructure.
The business model hinges on outcomes. Blocks only collects revenue when customers actually save money—a structure that aligns incentives but also means the company needs to deliver, consistently. In early April, one of the founders shared results from a customer call on social media: 24.6% in identified savings. It's anecdotal, to be sure, and the lack of broader case studies this early makes it hard to assess whether that figure is typical or an outlier. The company's LinkedIn profile mentions AWS partner status, though a search of Amazon's public partner directory doesn't immediately surface the company. That could simply be a matter of timing or administrative lag.
Riding the FinOps Wave
The timing, at least, seems sound. Cloud cost management has climbed the priority list for technology companies of all sizes, driven partly by economic uncertainty and partly by the realization that bloated cloud bills aren't just an operations problem—they're a strategic one. The FinOps Foundation's recent research underscores the trend: organizations are increasingly counting on optimization savings to fund their AI ambitions, effectively treating efficiency as a revenue source.
AWS pricing volatility hasn't hurt the case for tools like Blocks, either. A reported 15% price hike on certain EC2 GPU capacity blocks in January 2026 sent ripples through engineering circles, particularly among machine learning teams already wrestling with tight budgets. When costs can shift that dramatically, the argument for automated vigilance gets easier to make.
Blocks is hiring—aggressively so. Job postings for machine learning engineers and backend developers hint at the company's near-term goals, including plans to manage more than €500 million in cloud volume. That's an audacious target for a pre-seed company, but perhaps not surprising given Merkel's track record. Flink, after all, raised roughly $750 million in venture capital by late 2021, becoming one of Europe's fastest-growing consumer startups before the broader market correction set in.
The competitive landscape is crowded. CAST AI, ProsperOps, CloudZero—these aren't unknowns. Each has carved out a niche in the sprawling market for cloud financial management. What Blocks appears to be wagering on is that the combination of AI automation and collective bargaining power creates a moat wide enough to matter. Whether that holds true will depend on execution, customer traction, and how effectively the team can navigate AWS's labyrinthine pricing structures.
Beyond the Flixbus founders and Götze, the angel syndicate includes Felix Jahn, Philipp Triebel, Joerg Gerbig, Dr. Carolin Gabor, Mira Knauer, and Alexander Wigge—a mix of operators and investors with ties to Berlin's startup ecosystem. It's the kind of group that can open doors, make introductions, and lend credibility when a young company is still proving itself.
What Comes Next
The $6 million will go toward product development and early customer acquisition, with a focus on European startups—the segment most likely to benefit from enterprise-grade pricing without enterprise-grade budgets. Blocks is betting on three core capabilities: automated savings plan optimization, rightsizing (matching workloads to the appropriate instance types), and anomaly detection to catch runaway costs before they spiral.
Whether this becomes Merkel's second major win or a cautionary tale about market timing remains to be seen. For now, Blocks has capital, a compelling hook, and a founder who's done this before. In the unforgiving world of infrastructure software, that's more than most startups can claim at the starting line.
