A small story of where we come from
If a company could trace its own beginnings the way a person might recall a childhood street or a formative conversation, our story at FiniteNow would begin on certain Stuttgart mornings when the air still tastes faintly of metal and the valley sits in its familiar industrial haze. Before we existed as an idea, before our name meant anything to anyone, the city was already wrestling with a quiet shift. Stuttgart had long been a place that didn’t need to ask what came next; its future once seemed as engineered as its torque curves. But over the years, that confidence softened. The factories still hummed, yes, though not with the same inevitability.
Our own roots stretch back to a time before this mood settled in, back to a moment when two young engineers, Jan-Philipp Fuhr and Farbod Nezami, met during their doctoral years at major automotive manufacturers. It was an era of record sales and unshaken faith in the industry’s trajectory. No rational observer would have predicted that these two would walk away from the security of their research posts and the prestige of their employers.
But they did.
Not because of crisis or disillusionment, but because something in both of them leaned toward building rather than belonging. They left with very little except conversations that lingered in notebooks and workshops that felt more serious than they intended. Those early sketches became the first tremor in a sequence that, years later, would make our own existence possible.
Their first company, CIKONI, grew with the unhurried pace of engineering firms that seek depth rather than spectacle. Over time, it gathered a global reputation for composite materials expertise: oil extraction components one month, aerospace structures the next, clients from Korea, Japan, Brazil, the United States. Their work demanded the kind of patience that only engineers tolerate willingly, laboratory weekends, late-night simulation runs, experiments that required both caution and stubbornness. That discipline formed the first layer of our inheritance.
Five years into that journey, they built something unexpected: InstaWerk. What began as internal necessity: finding reliable, scalable manufacturing partners, became Germany’s leading digital manufacturing platform capable of instant pricing and intelligent routing. It was as if they had found a bottleneck in their own operations and, instead of working around it, chose to eliminate it for everyone else as well.
Along the way, another figure joined the story: Marcel Erich. His arrival was not dramatic, but foundational. He carried an instinct for structure and efficiency that shaped both workflow and culture. In hindsight, it is easy to see how this operational clarity would later seep into our own DNA at FiniteNow, our desire to make the chaotic predictable, the opaque transparent.
CIKONI, though, never stayed still. There was a promise the founders made to themselves: every year, they would push something new into the world. Not a client project, but an idea that hadn’t existed the year before. Some of these efforts became companies. Others became quiet footnotes. All of them nudged the industry forward by a few degrees.
One of these creations was Dynapixel, a reconfigurable mould built from a field of individually adjustable cells. It could shift its entire surface like a mechanical topography, making mass-customization not only feasible but economically rational. Custom systems found their way to the United States, to France, to BMW, and, unexpectedly, even to Walt Disney. It was never a mass-market venture, but everyone at CIKONI enjoyed the delicate puzzles each new customer brought with them.
Another experiment, AdditiveCarbon, set out to merge the worlds of composites and additive manufacturing. Robot-based reinforcement for 3D-printed parts: it sounded like the future. In execution, the future was slow to arrive. Just a handful of projects, no real traction, and eventually the quiet recognition that the timing was wrong. But the work enriched the team’s understanding, expanded dialogues with client engineers, and—perhaps most importantly—kept the ritual alive. Not everything needs to scale to matter.
And then, eventually, there was us.
FiniteNow did not appear as a departure, but as a convergence. We were born from the accumulated logic of the two older siblings and the many smaller experiments that came before. From CIKONI, we inherited the technical fluency required to understand complex simulations at their core. From InstaWerk, we absorbed the insistence that access should be instant, that expertise should not hide behind process, and that the friction between need and execution should be as close to zero as possible.
Another branch of our lineage came through Robert Wagner, who first encountered the founders not in a boardroom but through the frenetic world of student rocketry at the Technical University of Munich. Years later, when the possibility of co-founding FiniteNow arose, he recognized the pattern: this was a team that refused to wait for the industry to reform itself. They would rather build the tools that accelerate that reform.
Our ambition is simple to describe and complex to implement: to turn the long, opaque search for simulation expertise into a structured digital dialog – a system that understands the engineering need and produces clarity where ambiguity had always lived. The scoping calls, the weeks of back-and-forth, the inertia that slows even the most urgent projects – those are the gaps we exist to close. What once took months now takes hours. The friction dissolves; the real work can begin.
Looking back at our lineage, the pattern is unmistakable. CIKONI opened access to advanced engineering knowledge. InstaWerk opened access to manufacturing capacity. At FiniteNow, we open access to simulation – the invisible architecture behind modern product development.
When asked what connects all of this, Farbod once answered with a single word: access. Access to resources, partners, expertise – and, in the earliest days, access to the quiet support of former colleagues. But the most enduring access came from people: partners, co-founders, clients who stayed long enough to turn experiments into entities.
From where we stand now, in a region still defining its next chapter, our own origin feels less like a business narrative and more like a simple truth: some engineers refuse to wait. They build the tools they need. And eventually, one of those tools—shaped by composite labs, digital platforms, reconfigurable moulds, failed experiments and late-night rocket tests – became us.
Simulation Work Reinvented