Jakob Freund

Jakob Freund is co-founder and chief executive of Camunda, a Berlin, Germany, software company whose process orchestration software coordinates the steps of business processes for banks, insurers and manufacturers. Audi uses it to see which suppliers are affected when low water levels threaten a shipping route, and Goldman Sachs is another user. He started the company in 2008 with Bernd Ruecker.

A Childhood Plan to Build Software

He grew up in Berlin, the son of a lawyer who ran her own practice and a teacher, and by the age of eight or nine he was teaching himself to program on his father's computer. At 12, in 1991, he read a biography of Bill Gates and decided what he wanted to become. "I'm afraid the answer is a bit sad," he told Computer Weekly in 2026. "I wanted to be a software entrepreneur." What pulled him in most, he said, was the adventure of building something with a small team, "a small party on a quest, going through all those adventures together."

Learning 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 came across business process management along the way. Not yet sure what business to start, he took two jobs as an employee in the field. Both disappointed him: the managers did not inspire their people, and the culture felt rigid. "The first thing I learned there was how not to build a company," he said. He also disliked the bragging at one employer, which he believed made people overlook their own weaknesses.

Meeting Bernd Ruecker

While still employed, Freund ran a community website about business process management and went looking for writers. Around 2007 he found Ruecker, a freelancer in Stuttgart, Germany, on the business network Xing and asked him to write about a process standard listed on his profile. Ruecker turned the topic down and offered to write about something else, which Freund found opinionated and profound. When Freund was ready to start a firm, he visited Ruecker in Stuttgart. They worked out a consultancy in the afternoon, went out dancing that night and decided at about three in the morning to do it together.

A year after founding Camunda in 2008, the two wrote a book on BPMN, the standard for drawing business processes as flowcharts that software can also run. Later published in English as Real-Life BPMN, it sold in the thousands and gave the young consultancy credibility.

Turning a Consultancy Into a Software Company

For five years the two ran a bootstrapped consultancy of 10 to 15 people as co-CEOs. Freund became sole chief executive when joint decisions slowed the firm down, and Ruecker became its evangelist. "Bernd loves working with people, but he doesn't love managing them, whereas I felt a natural pull towards that," Freund said. In 2013 they forked Activiti, an open-source workflow project they had contributed to, and turned Camunda into a software company with an open-source product and a commercial edition. Rebuilding the workflow engine from scratch took about 10 years, and the new generation, Camunda 8, came with a license that Freund said kept large cloud providers from taking the code and competing with it.

Waiting a Decade for Investors

Camunda took no outside capital for its first decade. A three-month stay in San Francisco, California, with his family in 2014, through a German economics ministry program, changed his view of venture investors, whom he had thought greedy and pushy. Highland Europe became Camunda's first investor in 2018 and Insight Partners followed in 2021, and Freund said much of that money is still in the bank because the company has always run efficiently.

Making Camunda Fully Remote

He pushed for remote work around 2018, ran into strong resistance and was close to giving up in early 2020. When the pandemic hit two months later, he decided to make Camunda fully remote for good. About 200 of its roughly 650 employees are now in the United States, and hardly anyone goes to the Berlin office. "We're not a German company anymore, but we're not becoming an American company either," he said.

Leading Camunda Into AI Agents

Camunda now sells process orchestration with agentic AI, which lets companies run AI agents inside their existing business processes, Freund writes in a Forbes Technology Council column. He runs the company AI-first and uses Claude Code to pull answers from Slack, Google Drive and other tools. He told Computer Weekly he expects AI agents to begin assigning people tasks and assessing their work as early as 2027, and he is not sure where the line should be. "Where do we hand that sense of authority to an AI?" he asked.

Personal Life

Outside work he has set himself two goals: learning to play the guitar and learning to surf. "In both cases, I have zero talent. I just enjoy persevering and trying again," he said.