Sebastian Volkl

Sebastian Völkl
Occupation	Entrepreneur, software engineer
Known for	Co-founder and CEO of Dalus

Sebastian Völkl is a German entrepreneur and software engineer who is the co-founder and CEO of Dalus, a company developing AI-driven collaborative systems engineering software for hardware system design. The company was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2025 batch.

Career

Völkl co-founded Dalus in 2024 alongside Eliot Khachi. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in the business-to-business engineering software space.

Dalus develops a software platform designed to address problems in modern hardware system development. The platform enables engineering teams to model system architecture, simulate performance, manage requirements, and collaborate across technical disciplines. It is built on the SysML v2 specification, a standard for model-based systems engineering (MBSE). The software includes capabilities for requirements management, system architecture modeling, analysis and verification, test case generation, system safety and hazard assessment, mission planning, and team collaboration.

The company targets industries including energy, defense, aerospace, automotive, and robotics. According to Dalus, the platform aims to solve common challenges in hardware development such as complexity in system integration, costly late-stage design changes driven by unclear requirements, knowledge gaps caused by undocumented institutional knowledge, communication silos between technical disciplines, and stakeholder misalignment.

In 2025, Völkl appeared on the MBSE Podcast (Episode 59), where he discussed the vision behind Dalus, the challenges of building a new systems engineering tool, real-world use cases, and the platform's integration with SysML v2.

Völkl has also been noted for building a miniaturized version of the OpenClaw device — an AI-powered personal assistant built on a Raspberry Pi — which he demonstrated on a show hosted by Jason Calacanis. The device, described as smaller than an iPhone, was designed in the form factor of a portable device capable of listening, processing, and responding to its user.

In early 2025, Dalus announced the launch of a free plan for its platform, with the stated goal of making model-based systems engineering more accessible to a wider range of companies.