How Orbem Aligned Its Software Architecture to Business Strategy

Orbem is a deep tech scale-up based in Munich, Germany, building a healthier, more sustainable world, from the inside out. Using AI to industrialise MRI, Orbem enables non-invasive insight into everything from fruits to eggs to the human body. Translating what is becoming the world’s largest biological dataset into actionable intelligence, the company helps food producers, researchers, and other innovators make better decisions. This helps entire sectors reduce waste, increase quality, transparency and sustainability. 

Since its founding in 2019, Orbem has grown to 200 employees and recently secured €55.5m in Series B funding. With this growth came increased technical, organisational, and regulatory complexity. The leadership team recognised an urgent need to align their software architecture and engineering practices with the scale and ambition of the business.

The Challenge

Orbem had already begun investing in improving its engineering approach. They launched an initiative called the Edge Platform, which intended to:

• Enable faster integration of applications

• Reduce time-to-market

• Provide a scalable foundation for future growth

They sought to learn from engineering best practices, with a particular interest in Domain-Driven Design. They launched a book club where they read and shared their learnings on topics such as DDD, Data Mesh, and EventStorming.

The teams went on to set up small experiments to explore ideas they learned. But while their curiosity took them so far, they struggled to apply these learnings effectively into their own systems.

As a fast-growing company with delivery pressure and a relatively junior engineering organisation, it was difficult to turn theory into coherent, production-ready code. Much of this didn’t lead to outright failure, but it did create temporary misalignment with business priorities.

The Solution

Our work with Orbem centred on achieving alignment across strategy, domain expertise, architecture, and organisational structure.

1. Clarifying the Core Domain

Through workshops with leadership, we identified and articulated Orbem’s core domain - aka the capabilities that differentiate them and the most critical part of their system. This provided a reference point for architectural decisions:

• What must we build ourselves?

• What can we buy off-the-shelf?

• Where should we invest engineering effort?

• Which capabilities are strategically important, and which are supporting?

Making this explicit changed the nature of technical discussions and resulted in architectural decisions that better aligned with the business strategy.

2. Translating DDD into Practice

With the Edge Platform team, we focused on practical application.

This included:

• Targeted training grounded in Orbem’s own domain

• Code reviews to reinforce modelling decisions

• A working prototype in Python to demonstrate how their domain model could be expressed clearly in code

• Ongoing discussions about domain boundaries, aggregates, and responsibilities in their specific context

The aim was not to introduce patterns for the sake of it, but to help the team model their domain more effectively. Engineers developed confidence in making modelling decisions grounded in what the business was looking for.

3. Aligning Team Structure with Architecture

As the organisation scaled, we reviewed their team structures. 

Our approach included:

• Conducting interviews with key stakeholders to identify the pain points they were feeling.

• Designing 4 possible team structures, each elevating different pain points.

• Providing a trade-off analysis for each team structure.

• Recommending how the teams should be restructured both in the short and long term.

As domain boundaries emerged through our work together, we proposed adjustments to better align teams with their bounded contexts and strategic priorities. This reduced coordination overhead and clarified ownership.

The Outcome

A significant shift for Orbem was moving away from a focus on methods and techniques toward value and strategic fit.

Another important shift concerned build-vs-buy decisions. As growth continued and resources became more constrained, the organisation became more deliberate about where to invest internal engineering effort.

Our work at Orbem was not a one-off redesign but instead the beginning of a more disciplined way of translating business strategy into successful software.

In regulated, industrial and life sciences environments in particular, complexity is unavoidable. Orbem’s rapid growth amplified this complexity. Our role is to help leadership teams align their software architecture with their organisation’s business strategy. 

This enables:

• Faster time to market

• Strong connection between business strategy and architecture

• Clarity of the organisation’s core domain

• Increased modelling capability within teams

• Alignment between organisational design and system boundaries.

At Orbem, our work translated into tighter alignment between business strategy and the software systems built to deliver it, giving their teams a foundation to build on as they scale.