we are Maximilian Lindner and Paul Brachmann. We’re based in Berlin and we’ve been building things together since we were fifteen.
Malpaux is a combination of our two names, symbolising that we do things together and stay true to ourselves, our values, and our goal:
Empowering ideas
to do good in the world.
We embed with founders and leadership teams when product, brand, technology, and organisation need to change at the same time, and when the normal answers aren't fast or thorough enough to work. We've co-founded companies, held interim executive mandates, led rebrands alongside engineering restructures, and built systems from zero that reached millions of people. We take on two or three engagements at a time.
Every engagement is direct: you work with us, not a team assembled after the contract is signed.
We've built in healthcare, climate, and education, areas where the quality of the systems being built has consequences beyond the company building them. That's where we find the work worth doing.
What we've built.
Immunkarte, which we co-founded in 2021, went to five million cards distributed through 10,000 pharmacies and over €50m in revenue in a single year, run by a team of eight. Floy, where we held simultaneous Interim CTO and Creative Director mandates, closed a €9m seed extension after a full restructure of the product, technology, organisation, and brand. Visian, a volumetric annotation platform we built from scratch at the Hasso Plattner Institute, ended up in use at the WHO, Charité Berlin, and Mount Sinai. Cula, in which we invested at pre-seed and led the brand redesign, closed a €4m seed round and won Site of the Day on Awwwards.
Along the way, we’ve also witnessed a decisive picture of how we do not want to do things. But we also learned how we want to do things - and that’s what we are striving towards doing now:
Our goal is to help good ideas succeed, not optimise for our monetary benefit. In doing so, we bring our own thoughts and experiences. If you want someone who just takes on the execution of a task without caring much about its context, that is probably not us.
The primary payment we are interested in is making some tiny aspect of the world a bit better. This means that we happily take on non-profit projects without monetary compensation. As we understand that, even in a for-profit setup, not everyone can afford to pay our standard rates, we are always happy to discuss alternative compensation models such as revenue shares or VSOPs.
One example of this in practice: Reindeer, a feature documentary we are making about land, climate, and the question “what is enough?”. No client commissioned it. We are making it because we think it matters and because we have the capability to do it. It is in production now, and it is powered by the same conviction that runs through every engagement we take on.
Investments.
Alongside the operator work, we make a small number of pre-seed investments each year in founders building in healthcare, climate, and education. We invest where we can contribute more than capital: bringing product, design, and technical leadership to the earliest stage, when those things have the highest leverage. The founders we back tend to be people we'd want to work with regardless of whether money was involved.
Current and recent investments include:
Apply for collaboration.
If you're working on something difficult and think there might be a fit, the most useful first step is a short conversation.