About us · Three founders from the Ortenau district

From mechanical engineering. For industrial SMEs.

Kodo Leads is Joshua, Marcel and Benedict. Two of us studied mechanical engineering, one spent ten years working in industry. We build for sales teams in industrial SMEs what takes up most of their time: finding out whom to call this week.

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Your sales team should sell. Searching is our job.

From left: Benedict Mehlmann, Joshua Schätzle and Marcel Reinbold, laughing under a tree
Benedict, Joshua and Marcel. Friends since secondary school.

Why Kodo exists.

The three of us sat in the same class at secondary school. Afterwards each went his own way, Joshua and Marcel into mechanical engineering, Benedict into computer science. We stayed friends, and we like nothing better than being out in nature together.

Kodo started with a small job. A customer wanted a program that would show him suitable industrial companies without having to google for them. Until then he did everything by hand: search the website, open the imprint, copy names and numbers into an Excel sheet, company by company. That is when we saw how much time goes into it, and that almost every sales team in a mid-sized company works the same way.

We come from a region that lives on its mid-sized companies, and they matter to us. So we build Kodo for them: so that salespeople can sell instead of typing up lists.

Joshua Schätzle

Marcel Reinbold

Benedict Mehlmann

01 · Where we come from

We know the companies you sell to.

Baden-Württemberg in south-west Germany is machine-building country: contract manufacturers, tool makers, suppliers, many of them family firms with forty or four hundred people. All three of us come from the Ortenau district there, and Joshua knows these companies from ten years of project management in industry.

So we know what a machining centre is, what an IATF certification means and why a new hall or an opening for a CNC programmer is a good reason to call. Software does not know this by itself. It has to be taught, and that is what we do.

02 · Why industrial SMEs

Small sales teams, large markets.

In a mid-sized company, two or three salespeople often cover a whole market. The tools available were built for someone else.

  • There is no time.Whoever sells cannot read commercial registers, job boards, trade fair directories and company news every morning on the side. According to Destatis, 17 % of sales working time goes into searching.
  • The data is public, but scattered.Almost everything that makes a company ready to buy is public somewhere: an investment on its own website, a new opening, a new managing director in the register. Just not in one place.
  • The big databases are broad, not deep.They mostly come from the US and count contacts. A machining shop with forty people in the Swabian Jura barely shows up there, and nobody records which machines it runs.

03 · How we work

Every statement with a source.

If we cannot prove something, we do not write it down. That leads to four rules that cost us something.

Where the data comes from

  • Commercial register
  • Company register
  • Federal Gazette
  • Official announcements
  • Public tenders
  • Job ads
  • Trade fair exhibitor lists
  • Company news pages
  • Imprint and team pages
  • Patent registers
  • No rating number.Nobody can check a number between 0 and 100. You get the occasion with date and link and decide for yourself.
  • No bought address lists.We read the sources ourselves: registers, the Federal Gazette, job ads, trade fairs, the company website. Anyone who pays can have bought data.
  • No homework for your sales team.Our cards never say "please verify by phone". Your people call to sell, not to check our work.
  • No US data brokers.Servers in Germany, sources from Europe. That shortens the data protection review in your purchasing department.

04 · Who is behind it

You always talk to someone who knows the answer.

There are three of us, friends since school. Whoever calls does not end up in a ticket system but with the person who built or checked the list.

Joshua SchätzleManaging director, sales and customers

Master in mechanical engineering, ten years of project management in industry. He runs every first call himself and builds the target picture with you: which markets, which companies, which occasions.

Outside work: on the tennis court.LinkedIn
Benedict MehlmannTechnology and product

Cognitive science with physics at Bielefeld University. The field asks how a machine learns to read text like an expert. That is what the software he builds does.

Outside work: climbing, or working on a painting.LinkedIn
Marcel ReinboldData and checks

Trained toolmaker, then a degree and PhD in mechanical engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He knows the workshop from the inside, checks that our data holds what it claims and spots a technical feature that has been assigned wrongly.

Outside work: at the gym.LinkedIn

This site was designed and built by muria.agency. They make websites for industrial companies that bring in enquiries.

05 · The hard facts

No frills.

Full provider details in the Imprint.

Founded
2025
Team
three people, all three founders
Origin
Ortenau district, Baden-Württemberg
Registered office
Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg
Legal form
Sole proprietorship, owner Marcel Reinbold
Processing
Servers in Germany
Market
Germany, Austria, Switzerland

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