Bits&Pretzels 2025: Europe loves software. Hardware still has to fight.

ELECTRON attended Bits & Pretzels in Germany, a festival that’s billed as a meeting point for both software and hardware founders. On the ground, it still leans heavily software — which makes it a fascinating place to take the temperature of Europe’s start-up scene from a hardware perspective.

“For European hardware start-ups, the playing field still isn’t level,” says Marc-Henry de Jong, CCO/COO and Co-Founder of ELECTRON. “Many of us walk in with two strikes against us: we’re hardware, not software — and we’re a start-up, not a scale-up. Add long development cycles, certification, supply chains, and capital intensity, and it’s no surprise many European investors stay risk-averse and quietly step away from anything that can’t ship an update on Friday.”

Still, the mood is shifting. More investors — even in Europe — are starting to connect the dots: if we want our planet to remain Plan A, we have to change the physical world. Cleaner mobility, cleaner energy, cleaner industry. That’s not something you can solve with software alone.

And the rise of AI adds another twist. As building and copying software becomes faster and cheaper, the lifecycle of software products will only shorten. In that world, hardware starts to look less like a disadvantage and more like a defensible moat: long lead times, deep engineering, certification hurdles, and real-world integration that can’t be replicated overnight.

Bits & Pretzels may still be software-first, but it’s encouraging to see the conversation expanding beyond apps and platforms towards the technologies that reshape reality.

The only question left is: where do hardware masochists go?

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