Anna-Julia Storch and Leonie Freisinger set out to win. Anna-Julia brings the instincts of a former professional downhill skier: read the terrain, commit to the line, and adjust in real time. Leonie engineered drivetrain protection software at Porsche, where precision is the baseline. They met at Stanford, bonded over a shared impatience with industrial inefficiency, and built Dryft to do something surprisingly hard: teach industrial operations to learn from context and react in real time, turning slow, manual workflows into adaptive, self-correcting systems.

Dryft’s technology helps accelerate the physical world: how fast we build houses, produce vaccines, or manufacture public transportation. They're building the decision-making infrastructure for an industry that moves trillions of dollars in goods every year.

General Catalyst is proud to be partnering with these visionaries at Dryft from day one.

Manufacturing's Billion-Dollar Balancing Act

Manufacturing runs on a knife’s edge. Stockouts halt production and erode customer trust; excess inventory locks up cash and creates waste. For decades, manufacturers have tried to manage this balance through fixed parameters and manual corrections—systems that plan but don’t adapt. They follow rules instead of understanding context. The result: billions locked up in the wrong materials at the wrong time.

Dryft replaces that static logic with a new foundation for industrial operations. Its technology combines context-aware AI agents with mathematical optimization to automate operational decisions, from order quantities to supplier coordination and safety stock adjustments. Dryft builds a contextual representation of industrial knowledge that understands the nuances of each part, material, and supplier, and turns that understanding into action.

Competitive Grit Meets Industrial Scale

Anna-Julia and Leonie have already delivered seven-figure annual savings for leading European and U.S. industrial companies. They combine product instinct, applied AI expertise, and the kind of grit it takes to sell into entrenched enterprise workflows.

We sat down with Anna-Julia to learn more about her vision for the future of industrial purchasing. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What insight are you building on that is obvious to you but not to others?

Most manufacturing systems don’t actually understand the factory. They treat operations as static data—lists of parts, suppliers, and lead times—or at best as a mathematical optimization problem. Dryft is built on the opposite idea: factories can only run efficiently if systems understand context, act on it, and learn from it. 

What makes you confident in the future of Dryft?

C-level leadership at our customers have spent 10-hour days with us exploring how Dryft can fix issues they couldn’t solve with any existing system for years. When that level of time and urgency is on the table, you know you’re onto something real. The problem is hard. The upside is massive. No one has solved it yet.

As a founder, how do you think about perseverance?

Perseverance is something you learn over time, and really during childhood. I grew up as a competitive ski racer in a region far from the Alps that’s not known for skiing. I placed last in many regional competitions before eventually working my way up to the podium at national championships and international races. We hire talent who have endured challenges and worked their way up. It's not about where you are today, but how far you had to climb to get there.

What’s your approach to building team culture early on?

Our culture resembles a performance sports team. We’re very focused on extreme ownership and personal growth. Everyone sets weekly improvement goals, and feedback is direct. We also push each other to stay active and focused. We spend a lot of time onsite with customers, and every engineer works with them directly to understand their pain points and build the best possible product.

What impact do you want this company to have in the world? 

Over the last 20 years, we've seen exponential speed in software. The next 20 will be about bringing that same acceleration to hardware and manufacturing. With Dryft, manufacturers can respond faster, produce smarter, and ship sooner, turning slow, reactive systems into living, adaptive ones. For many users, Dryft is the first truly delightful software they've ever used at work—proving that industrial systems can be both intelligent and beautiful.