Kerstin Eichmann

Kerstin Eichmann has spent more than a decade at the frontier of fintech, blockchain and innovation, working across both startups and large corporates. Earlier in her career she worked at advertising agency BBDO and then became a fintech pioneer as Product Lead at Fidor Bank, one of Europe's earliest API/challenger banks, where she supervised the integration of the crypto exchange bitcoin.de into the bank's payment wallet. She subsequently managed the technical-evangelism team at Microsoft GmbH Germany before moving into corporate venturing.

In January 2017 she joined the innogy Innovation Hub (the venture arm of German utility innogy, later folded into E.ON and rebranded Future Energy Ventures) as the "lighthouse lead" for the Machine-Economy program. As Managing Director of the Berlin Outpost, she built and ran innogy's blockchain/crypto/token investment thesis, arguing that the future customer of an energy utility would not be a person but an autonomous machine that generates, aggregates, trades and stores energy on its own. Together with her team she invested in the infrastructure, identity and service layers of Web3.

Today she continues that same thesis at peaq (built by EoT Labs), a Layer-1 blockchain and operating system for the machine economy and DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure), where she serves as Head of Ecosystem Investments. Her career path — utility CVC to a dedicated machine-economy protocol — makes her one of the most consistent and specialized voices on autonomous machine-to-machine commerce in Europe. She has been a frequent conference speaker (Blockchain Summit Frankfurt, FinTech Forum, MEX Design Talk, The Wall Street Lab podcast) and an active writer on Medium and LinkedIn.

• Core belief: "The future client of an energy system will be a machine (a responsive IoT device)" that can autonomously generate, aggregate, buy and trade energy or flexibility — value exchanged between machines with no human in the loop.
• "Maslow for machines" framework: she maps investments to a hierarchy of machine needs — energy (physiological), infrastructure/oracles/predictive maintenance (safety), M2M identity & collaboration (belonging), autonomous decision-making & tokenized payments (esteem), and DAOs (self-actualization).
• Layers she backs: protocols, middleware, service-layer components, key financial instruments and dApps that shape the machine economy — specifically infrastructure, identity/KYC, and service layers of Web3.
• Stage & check: early/seed, historically ~€500k late-seed to €1M, positioned as a strategic investor from day one, offering portfolio companies industry networks and access to the utility's/ecosystem's core business rather than just capital.
• What makes her say yes: disruptive rather than incremental ideas — she has framed her ambition as building "an entire new banking/economic system," and looks for teams enabling trustless M2M protocols, decentralized identity and real-time machine payments.