Start-up FAST AI Movies

Starting a company while still at school

Florian Scherl, now 21, developed an early interest in IT and Artificial Intelligence. Aged just 12, he taught himself programming after school from online courses, attended programming camps, and entered IT competitions with AI models he had trained himself. But the boy from Traunstein, Upper Bavaria, soon outpaced those beginnings.

“I always got pretty far, but then I didn’t take the projects any further, and that used to bother me a bit,” says Florian Scherl. Instead of working on a program in purely theoretical terms, his aim was to transform it into entrepreneurial reality. That opportunity came along in Year 11 at his school, the Chiemgau-Gymnasium. As part of a project seminar, Florian Scherl and two of his fellow students drew up a business plan involving the use of Artificial Intelligence to produce short movies. The team’s idea scooped second place in JUGEND GRÜNDET, a competition for budding entrepreneurs.

Learning from the Silicon Valley 

From those beginnings, Scherl and his teammates took giant leaps towards founding their company. As their prize for achieving second place, they were invited to visit Silicon Valley in the U.S.A., the cradle of so many high-tech companies. Florian Scherl also received a donation of a high-performance AI-computer from a company and was invited to take up an internship at an AI start-up in Pforzheim. “These experiences clinched it for me,” he recalls. “I decided to found a start-up of my own.” And so it came that on the day before his math exam in May 2022, 18-year-old Scherl was sitting in a notary’s office in Traunstein waiting for official notarization of his company’s shareholders’ agreement.

However, he felt the lack of someone to talk to about his progress and share the responsibility. TUM, which he joined as an Informatics student in 2022, provided exactly what he needed. An entrepreneurship scheme by the student initiative TUM.ai brought him into contact with Philipp Gabriel, a master’s student of Information Systems who had already amassed practical experience in a variety of companies. “We make a great team,” says Scherl. 

Taking up the opportunities in coaching and networking offered by TUM Start-up Consulting and TUM Venture Lab Software/AI, the duo honed their company idea: FAST AI Movies. Their focus is now an AI model that automatically creates explanatory videos based on companies’ existing online brochures or Intranet texts. The program recognizes semantic relationships between concepts, such as similarities, hierarchies, and causalities, and transforms them into a graphic structure augmented by easy-to-understand pictograms. The animations are accompanied by quiz questions, likewise generated automatically. Finally, the videos can be edited manually. “Our software is designed to smooth the transfer of knowledge between employees and departments and make the content more memorable,” says Florian Scherl.

Promoting accessible knowledge

As the primary market for their product, the company’s founders have identified industries that require compliance with complicated regulations or that sell intangible products, such as the IT, financial, and insurance sectors. Their AI software is already used by savings and cooperative banks and by the public health insurance company AOK Baden-Württemberg. In addition, the company gained its first investor at the end of 2024. Scherl is now fully occupied with the task of relocating from the TUM Incubator to his own premises and recruiting his first full-time employees, and has put his studies on hold for the moment. 

What’s the most exciting aspect of working at a start-up? “Our AI enables us to provide easier and fairer access to work-related knowledge,” affirms Florian Scherl. “A start-up may only be a small first step, but it enables us to maximize our limited resources in creating something that will have a great impact.”