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.
Max & Paul.
We met each other in 2009. By the time we were thinking seriously about startups, we'd already spent years making things: competing in science fairs, writing code, making films, arguing about ideas.
Max leads all design and creative work at Malpaux: identity, brand, product experience, visual systems. He has an instinct for the moment when a company's external expression stops matching its internal reality — and the gift of guessing every font face on the first try.
His entry point into building things was Lego, seriously enough that it carried him through multiple rounds of the Schüler experimentieren science fair competition, winning regional and state-level prizes along the way. That instinct for making things that are both functional and considered has never really left. He studied Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences Europe, running Fanation in parallel: a merchandise agency he founded at seventeen, handling everything from design and print to logistics and customer support for sports clubs, businesses, and NGOs.
He co-founded Immunkarte in 2021, creating the name and the identity system that helped a healthcare product earn the trust of over five million people — work that earned a Special Mention at the German Design Award. He built Floy's visual identity from its founding, then returned in 2024 to lead a full rebrand as the company reached a new commercial inflexion point. He led the Cula brand from scratch before the product had revenue, designing the trust infrastructure a credibility-deficient market needed before traction could make that argument — a site that won Site of the Day on Awwwards.
Outside his professional work, he is an incurable Saab enthusiast and the curator of what is, by any reasonable measure, an unreasonable Lego collection.
Paul
Brachmann
Paul leads the technical and organisational work at Malpaux: technology, product, architecture, the structural decisions that determine what a company can build and how fast it can move.
Growing up in Berlin, he started studying IT-Systems Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam at age 16, completing both his Bachelor's and Master's with distinction, the latter with a thesis on automated tract segmentation to predict surgical risk in brain tumour patients, in collaboration with the neurosurgical department at Charité. During his studies at HPI, he built Visian, a volumetric annotation platform deployed by a WHO focus group, Charité Berlin, and Mount Sinai, and published at Web3D '21. His interest in hard technical problems goes back further than that: From age nine on, he competed in Jugend forscht’s computer science category six times in a row, taking state-level and national prizes and serving as a judge from 2019 on. In 2025, he completed paramedic training with internships at Charité and the Berlin Fire Department. Outside his professional work, he is a passionate filmmaker and mountaineer. He also holds licenses as a fitness and medical fitness trainer, personal trainer, and massage therapist.
At the beginning of his Master's, he co-founded his first company. He scaled the technology behind Immunkarte from zero to over 100,000 cards a day with a team of eight, serving as Head of Technology at APO Pharma Immun from day one. He has served as CTO at Floy since 2024, leading a full rebuild of their engineering organisation, product infrastructure, and AWS migration while 200+ radiology offices kept scanning patients daily. He produced the Carbon Stories documentary series for Cula and is currently directing Reindeer, an in-house feature documentary in production in Sápmi and Southern Norway.
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 a WHO focus group, 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 may 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 something here, the best first step is just reaching out.