The remaining 483,000 - seven out of ten - started alongside a job, studies or another main occupation. That is the highest part-time share the KfW-Gründungsmonitor has ever recorded.
Almost every entrepreneurship programme in the country is designed for the smaller number.
Who is actually founding in Germany right now
The KfW-Gründungsmonitor is worth taking seriously precisely because it does not only count startups. It counts entrepreneurial activity - the full population of people who started something, including the ones who will never appear in a funding database.
The picture it produces for 2025 looks like this:
Founding intensity reached 136 founders per 10,000 working-age adults, up from 115 in 2024. The average founder is 34.2 years old, and 40% are under 30. Women make up 35% of all new founders, down slightly from 36%, with the decline concentrated in full-time founding, where the female share fell from 33% to 27%. 34% hold an academic degree, up from 26% in 2007. 34% have a migration background, compared with roughly 28% of the general population. And 44% of new ventures build on digital offerings, up from 36% the previous year.
The motive shift is the most interesting part of the dataset, and the most under-discussed. Among part-time founders, “higher or additional income” jumped from 32% to 40% as the leading motive in a single year. Independence fell from 18% to 13%. Self-realisation fell from 23% to 20%.
The dominant reason people in Germany started something in 2025 was money. Not autonomy, not vision, not a technology insight. Income.
Now put that next to the population most programmes are actually built around. The Deutscher Startup Monitor 2025 reports that 87% of startup founders hold an academic degree - roughly 23% bachelor, 46% master or equivalent, 19% doctorate - concentrated in economics and business (33.8%), engineering (20.4%), computer science and mathematics (16.6%) and natural sciences (10.3%).
87% academic in the startup population. 34% academic across all new founders in Germany.
Those are not two views of the same person. They are two different populations, and the gap between them is the whole argument.
The curriculum gap: what part-time founders need and rarely get
Take a standard entrepreneurship programme and check it against the person the KfW data describes.
Full-time cohort commitment: incompatible with a job. Daytime sessions: incompatible with a job. A milestone structure shaped around funding rounds: irrelevant to someone who has no intention of raising. Equity-splitting and cap-table workshops: irrelevant to a solo founder with no equity to split. Demo day as the culminating event: irrelevant to someone whose success metric is a second paying customer, not an investor’s attention.
None of that content is wrong. It is simply written for a person who represents a minority of actual entrepreneurial activity.
What the majority is dealing with is a different list. How to price when you have no comparables. How to find the first ten customers, which the KfW data flags as an increasingly hard problem - difficulty acquiring customers rose to 57% as a reported obstacle. How to bound the time so the side venture does not consume every evening. The legal and tax basics, which sound boring and are the reason ventures quietly stop. Bureaucracy, still the top-cited obstacle at 64%. And the decision that hangs over the whole thing: when to leave the job, and equally, when not to.
That last one deserves its own module and almost never gets one. Financial risk shows the strongest correlation with abandoning a founding plan in the KfW data. The moment of going full-time is the single highest-risk decision most of these founders will make, and the standard programme narrative treats it as an obvious, celebratory step rather than a calculation.
There is a legitimate counterargument, and it should be taken seriously rather than waved away. Part-time ventures create less employment and, on average, less innovation than full-time startups. If public money funds entrepreneurship education, why should it serve the side hustle?
Two reasons. First, entrepreneurial agency compounds regardless of the vehicle. Someone who has priced a service, found a customer and delivered on a promise has capabilities that transfer into any employment, any later venture, and any role in an ecosystem. Second, and more practically: for most people, a side venture is the only affordable way to test whether entrepreneurship is for them at all. Removing that path does not produce more full-time founders. It produces fewer founders.
The KfW outlook for 2026 puts the planning rate at 5.1%, against 4.9% the year before. Stable to slightly higher. This is not a spike that will correct itself.
Most people in Germany do not start a startup. They start something. Programmes should know the difference.
