Vanilla Steel

Vanilla Steel is a B2B steel trading company based in Berlin. We trade steel across Europe, and we build the software our own traders use to do it.

That combination is unusual in our industry. One side of the business is trading: buying and selling with suppliers and buyers across Europe, with a particular focus on the DACH region. The other is a small product and engineering team building the tools that make that trading faster and more transparent than the phone and spreadsheet processes the industry still largely runs on.

We are around 25 people from a wide mix of backgrounds and nationalities. English is the language of the team, German and other European languages are the languages of our customers. We are small enough that people take on real responsibility early: one of our account managers joined as an intern and now runs their own portfolio of customers and suppliers.

We are VC-backed and still early enough that how we work is genuinely open to being shaped by the people who join.

To be the market leader for hassle-free metal trading in Europe.

Steel trading still runs largely on phone calls, PDFs and spreadsheets. Prices are opaque, processes are slow, and a single deal can involve weeks of back and forth. We think trading steel should be as clear and fast as any modern marketplace, without losing the relationships and expertise the industry actually runs on.

So we do both. We trade, which keeps us honest about what matters to buyers and suppliers. And we build, which means the things we learn get turned into tools our own team and our customers can use.