We are Gentlent

See the people who move you forward with conviction, empathy, and real reliability.

Led by developers

Tom KleinTom KleinCEOFrom Cloudflare to entrepreneurship: as Managing Director of Gentlent, Tom personally stands for web and software engineering that scales. His foundation is deep expertise in incident management and scalable infrastructure - anycast, CDN, BGP, and cloud. Hands-on data center experience included. From the first code commit to a fully scaled cloud solution, Tom owns your software with technical precision and a solution-first mindset, so things simply work for you.
Florian O. ElkeFlorian O. ElkeCEONetwork engineering, cloud, and software development from one source: that is Florian's specialty, sharpened at DMRZ, Green Connector, and other well-known companies. At his core, he is a true builder who can connect every system. With real hands-on data center experience, he understands infrastructure from the ground up. As Managing Director of Gentlent, he combines this practical expertise with clean, scalable code for solutions that grow with you by design.
Sammy P.Sammy P.Executive Assistant
Daniel S.Daniel S.Systems Engineer
Simon R.Simon R.Systems Engineer
Laila E.K.Laila E.K.IT Sales Engineer

Gentlent GmbH

Gentlent began with a practical question: why should people spend a working day on something a small script can finish in minutes? The answer took us from a desk full of advertising figures to software, cloud infrastructure, and a network we operate ourselves.

  1. 2016We first saw the problem inside YouTube multi-channel networks in the United States and Canada. People spent eight hours a day managing and booking thousands of lines of advertising revenue by hand. We wrote a simple script, and the same work took minutes. It was not a grand product launch. It was a small tool that gave people their day back. That moment shaped the company before the company existed: much of the work people dread is work a machine should do, provided someone takes the time to understand it and build the right solution.
  2. Before that script, Tom had already started working with IT at 13 and registered his first business at 16, two years earlier than the law normally allows. Friends kept asking him to build websites, and the growing collection of projects needed one name. Stralsund was home and remains a beautiful place, but there was no IT horizon there to grow toward. The curiosity was present; what was missing was an environment where one technical idea could meet the next and turn into something larger.
  3. January 2019A job at a mobility technology startup brought Tom to Düsseldorf almost by chance. The move meant entering the economic capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, surrounded by companies, technology, and people building things. For us, faster did not mean rushing or skipping the difficult work. It meant that a decision became working software sooner, feedback arrived while an idea was still fresh, and each project created momentum for the next. Düsseldorf offered the room to move that Stralsund could not.
  4. May 2019Our first paid work was a single landing page for a YouTube network, delivered through Tom's sole proprietorship. It was a modest beginning, the project that started the spark and made the direction visible. The name came later: we discarded many ideas before settling on Gentlent®, a combination of Gentlemen and Entrepreneur. It described how we wanted to approach customers: entrepreneurial enough to solve the real problem, and decent enough to say clearly what the work required and what it did not.
  5. That approach now runs through the work we do. We develop software and apps, both native and cross-platform, integrate systems, handle DevOps, and provide hosting, domains, and cloud services on infrastructure we operate ourselves. We also know the settings in which that technology has to work. Our experience comes from inside ambulance services and medical practices, mobility, media and the creator economy, and eCommerce. Those are places where a workflow is never just a diagram: there are real people waiting when a system is slow, disconnected, or needlessly complicated.
  6. 2019 – 2024For years, Gentlent was a side hustle rather than a structured company. The assignments still had a direction: the work flowed into the main codebase of our own cloud platform. Each new demand forced us to think about scalability and what reliable operation means beyond the application itself. We learned to run data centers, work with autonomous system numbers, and build peering relationships. The platform grew after hours, through systems that had to remain available and infrastructure that we had to understand rather than hand off.
  7. The price was real. There were hard swings, nights in the office, and long stretches when we were always close to zero. Customers rejected us because the team looked too small. We kept one rule through it: an invoice should reflect useful work, not every change that could become a line item. We did not bill minor changes merely because we could. We removed unnecessary work instead of selling it. When one customer's codebase needed a full rework, we did it cheaply and saved that customer tens of thousands of euros. That is our proof of honesty.
  8. January 2024Flo had joined us as an intern back in the side-project years, long before the company existed, and stayed. He knew the code, the infrastructure, and the reality behind both. Together, Tom and Flo founded Gentlent UG (haftungsbeschränkt) and became its two CEOs. The legal form changed, but the working relationship already had years behind it. Responsibility remained close to the work: the people making company decisions were also the people who could open the codebase, trace a fault, and understand what a customer was actually asking us to solve.
  9. June 2025The UG became Gentlent GmbH, and more stories joined ours. Sammy joined us doing both basic bookkeeping and engineering, and still does both today. Daniel and Simon came as interns from the same engineering class. Laila told them about the internship, forgot to apply herself, and is now our IT Sales Engineer. Behind this team is infrastructure we can point to: our own rack in a Tier III data center in Düsseldorf, operated by a company certified to ISO 27001 and ISO 9001. We run our own servers, cabling, and network. Our autonomous system AS52112 has more than 2,500 direct connections to other network operators. Today, we are six employees with four interns.
Interns and helpersThese people completed an internship with us or helped for a while before today's team existed:Adilcan D. (alias Winnie Pooh) · Alina L. · Bernd O. · Bjarne B. · Celina S. · Daniel S. · Dimitrios N. · Dion T. · Duy A. B. · Helge A. W. · Jan E. P. · Jonas A. · Justin S. · Manuel S. · Marius E. · Mark M. · Markus H. · Max V. G. · Maximilian S. · Phetrack K. · Rene K. · Robin W. · Simon R. · Till v. T.