anny, a Cologne company that makes booking-management software, has acquired HiDesk, an AI startup from the same city that answers phone calls and messages for small businesses. The deal was reported on October 7, 2026 by Trending Topics and Dealroom News.
The purchase price was not disclosed.
The deal came less than a year after HiDesk was founded. Its whole team, including co-founders Florestan Peters and Jeremy Meidinger, is moving to anny and will keep working on the product. The two companies plan to combine their software into what they call "Agentic Booking Management".
What HiDesk built
HiDesk sells an AI assistant to small and medium-sized businesses. It picks up every call and message, draws on what it knows about the business, and then takes the next step itself, whether that is forwarding a call or booking an appointment. The company started with phone automation and planned to add other channels. Its job ads named medical practices, law firms, trades businesses and hotels as typical customers.
In its job ads, HiDesk said its agents take calls, answer emails and chat messages, handle routine requests and pass important cases to the right person, working around the clock like a trained member of staff. Meidinger's LinkedIn posts said the product had launched publicly only months before the sale.
The startup already served more than 250 customers and partners and was growing about 20% a month, according to the companies. HiDesk said it reached profitability within its first year.
Meidinger wrote on LinkedIn that he started HiDesk with Peters, a friend and former colleague from SoSafe. The pair were accepted into Antler One, a community for founders, and Meidinger described the company as bootstrapped.
“The first wave of AI learned to talk. The second is learning to work.”
Why anny is buying
anny, founded in 2020, lets organisations make shared resources bookable for internal staff and outside customers. It says more than 1,500 customers use it, including coworking spaces, event and education providers, universities, libraries and public bodies.
The two companies want AI to handle the whole process behind a customer request rather than only reply to it. HiDesk brings the agent that talks to customers across channels; anny brings the booking system and the business rules behind it. If a customer asks for a free slot, the AI can check availability, prices and stored rules in anny's system and complete the booking. Changes and cancellations work the same way.
Lucian Holtwiesche, anny's chief executive and co-founder, said the combined product would bring AI out of customer communication and into a company's back office, from quotes and bookings through to accounting. He said the AI was meant to support staff, not replace them.
Holtwiesche described the goal as an AI employee that links customer communication with back-office work. For anny, the deal adds a front end that can take requests by phone and message and feed them straight into the booking system its customers already run.
Built without venture capital
Both companies are profitable and say they have grown without outside capital. Holtwiesche said anny had been built without external money from the start and that the same was true of HiDesk. In 2022 anny told Startbase it had paused its search for venture funding to grow from its own revenue, and the company has not announced a funding round since.
Neither side disclosed whether the purchase was paid in cash, shares or a mix.
Running the AI in Europe
anny and HiDesk also want to run core parts of their AI themselves to reduce dependence on single outside providers. The team is already training its own small models for voice conversations and runs them on its own infrastructure in Europe. More specialised models are to follow.
Peters said software used to be something that had to be set up and learned, but would now be onboarded like a new team member. That, he argued, gives small businesses automation that previously required their own IT department.
