# START pod: Nikolas Keller, CEO & Co-Founder, Walter "AI Employee for Manufacturing Operations"

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/start-7171926/start-pod-nikolas-keller-ceo-co-founder-walter-ai-employee-for-manufacturing-operations
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/start-7171926/start-pod-nikolas-keller-ceo-co-founder-walter-ai-employee-for-manufacturing-operations.md
Podcast: [START](https://stenobird.com/podcast/start-7171926)
Published: 2026-06-10T20:31:57+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/acd9fd16
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/acd9fd16/c7c69717.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/start-7171926/episodes/start-pod-nikolas-keller-ceo-co-founder-walter-ai-employee-for-manufacturing-operations
Duration seconds: 1026

## Resource

The best AI companies aren't replacing bad software. They're giving it a login. Every software company for years has made the same pitch to manufacturers: clean APIs, migrate your stack, rip out your ERP. It never works. The ERP is the company brain. Years of data. You can't rip it out any more than you can rip out someone's memory. Nikolas Keller & Co-Founder Lukas Postulka figured out the obvious thing that everyone missed Stop trying to replace the software. Give an AI employee a login instead. Walter (YC P26) signs into SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Oracle the way a new hire would. Ready to go from day 1. Works out of Teams and email like the rest of the team. Reads orders. Enters them. Places supplier POs. Catches pricing errors before they ship... Not another dashboard. Not another integration project. Not another rip and replace. A purchase order that used to take 15 minutes now takes a few seconds. The insight came from a $109M manufacturer who had a full-time employee doing nothing but typing purchase orders into an ERP Not because the work was valuable. Because the software demanded it. With Walter, your software stays. The manual work disappears. 🎙️ Nikolas Keller, CEO & Co-Founder of Walter (YC P26) on Fondo START 02:02 Growing up across Beijing, Zurich, Munich, and Singapore 02:53 Walking into French restaurants asking for a job 04:10 Why he walked away from the Michelin-star path 04:48 Choosing startups because uncertainty was the point 05:25 Flying to San Francisco with a duffel bag 06:18 Getting rejected, then forcing his way into a startup 07:06 Learning software engineering and customer discovery 08:00 Meeting future co-founder Lukas Pistoor 09:00 Lukas' bias toward action and unconventional journey 10:16 Discovering the manufacturing workf…

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