Nominated as Business Innovator: askTheodor catches the German Innovation Institute’s eye

This week a letter from the German Innovation Institute (Deutsches Innovationsinstitut, diind) landed in our mailbox: our company has been nominated as a Business Innovator, in cooperation with UNTERNEHMER magazine. The recognition goes to companies that make new technology tangible and usable for others. For us, the reason is askTheodor, the desktop app we launched in July.

I’m genuinely happy about it, and grateful. For a small company like ours, being noticed like this is not something we take for granted.

Business Innovator — visionär, wegweisend, zukunftsfähig (visionary, pioneering, future-proof)

What the nomination recognises

In short, the letter says that with askTheodor we give small businesses a fully local AI workforce, with specialists from dozens of professions working right on their own computer. That was exactly our goal: AI that helps not just large corporations, but the trade business, the practice and the three-person agency.

What makes askTheodor different

• Local-first: files, credentials and search indexes stay on your machine.
• Agents prepare, humans approve: nothing leaves without your explicit yes.
• Your model, your choice: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini or a local model through Ollama, fully offline if you like.

What happens next

A nomination isn’t an award yet, and that’s how we take it: as encouragement, not a finish line. We’ll share the outcome here as soon as it’s known. One thing is already certain: our innovative apps are only going to get better. We work on it every day, so that askTheodor and our other tools take real work off small businesses’ plates.

Thank you to everyone who has been testing askTheodor since launch and sending us feedback. This nomination is yours too.

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