Hyground

About us

Build with purpose

Join a team reshaping how enterprises manage infrastructure with sovereign AI.

Meet the Founders

Entrepreneurs & Architects

With deep expertise in DevOps and Generative AI.

  • Dominik Rehbock

    Dominik Rehbock

    CEO

    Strategy-driven entrepreneur with experience across consulting and deep-tech. Previously worked at Bain & Company and served as Strategy Director at Innolith, a battery technology company that raised over $120M. Outside of work, he's often skiing or chasing waves.

  • Benjamin Hofmann

    Benjamin Hofmann

    CPO

    Cloud-native architect by background, with deep experience in DevOps and AI adoption. Co-founded AI4U at MaibornWolff to drive generative AI across the consultancy and its enterprise clients. Earlier: cloud migrations at Dräger, real-time microservices at Deutsche Bahn, CI/CD infrastructure at Jumio. Found in the mountains, in the ocean, or lost in electronic music.

  • Bastian De Groot

    Bastian De Groot

    CTO

    Has spent over a decade building infrastructure where milliseconds matter, most recently across cloud-native, automation, and AI-driven operations. Before that, he ran high-frequency trading systems at Bloomberg. Off the clock, he automates factories in Factorio and plays complex board games.

How we got here

From an on-call shift to a funded company

By 2030, most enterprise IT will run itself - or it won't run at all. Today it runs on the discipline of a few engineers: carrying pagers at 3 AM, chasing alerts, executing run books that should have been automated years ago. We started Hyground because that model doesn't scale and because for the first time, it doesn't have to. Three founders, a decade of operations experience, and one conviction: the next generation of IT runs on agents that enterprises own and control.

Milestones

  1. 2012–2022

    Benny and Bastian spend a decade in software engineering, SRE, and cloud operations: the foundation the product still stands on.

  2. Early 2023

    The first useful LLMs arrive. Benny and Bastian see where it's going for software operations and decide to act.

  3. Summer 2023

    A colleague on a highly critical logistics project for a German car manufacturer describes their 24/7 on-call workflow: analyse, categorise, follow the run book. It looks like the perfect target for automation. LLM function calling is announced the same summer.

  4. Early 2024

    First prototype ships, internal codename Remediations: a chatbot that drives a Kubernetes cluster. Tested at the same project. It works, but the customer doesn't buy. We keep going.

  5. March 2025

    Spinout from MaibornWolff agreed. Dominik joins as third co-founder, bringing the team's first startup-building experience.

  6. May 2025

    Benny and Bastian leave MaibornWolff; all three co-founders go full-time on Hyground.

  7. June 2025

    Hyground GmbH formally incorporated. Florian joins as the first founding engineer.

  8. July 2025

    First external funding lands: around €75k over 10 months from the IFB Hamburg InnoFounder programme.

  9. August 2025

    Deutsche Bahn signs as Hyground's first licensed customer.

  10. November 2025

    Signed multiple Proof-Of-Value contracts

  11. December 2025

    €3M pre-seed closed: Partech leads, alongside Adesso Ventures, Angel Invest, and Plug and Play.

  12. January 2026

    In total, Hyground has >100 daily active users.

  13. February 2026

    Hyground has 10+ paying customers

  14. March 2026

    Hyground brand and website launch publicly. The funding round is announced at KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam.

  15. April 2026

    Team expanded to 11+ talented people

Opportunities

Open positions

We're always looking for talented people to join our team.