About Kilian Günthner
I invent tools that make complex capabilities accessible.
I am Kilian Günthner (alternate spellings: Kilian Guenthner / Kilian Gunthner), an inventor, product designer, musician, and legal professional working across software, scientific instrumentation, music technology, and social-impact systems.
I am an inventor and product designer interested in a simple question: what important capability is locked away by cost, complexity, or friction, and how can it be made available to the people who actually need it?
That question has shaped my work since I was young. My first inventions were physical systems built around practical constraints. I designed a passive flood-protection seal that used superabsorbent polymers to close gaps in doors and windows automatically when water reached them, without electricity, mechanical deployment, or human intervention. The project was recognized through Germany's national STEM competition system Jugend forscht, received the Nicolaus August Otto Special Prize for Innovation, and led to an invitation to further develop the invention with support from institutions including the University of Cologne, LANXESS, and Wallburger.
Learn more about the flood protection system
I later built a low-cost digital reflected-light microscope and graphene mapping system to make advanced materials research more accessible. Commercial reflected-light microscopes capable of identifying graphene and other ultra-thin materials typically cost thousands to tens of thousands of euros. My system retrofitted standard microscopes with custom optics, calibration hardware, and software, reducing the cost to a few hundred euros while making single-atom-thick carbon layers visible. The project won first prize in Technology at the North Rhine-Westphalia state level of Jugend forscht, the highest level available in my age category, and was later used in early graphene experimentation by researchers who went on to work in two-dimensional materials science.
Learn more about the digital reflected-light microscope
In 2015, I founded Aletho, a social-impact platform intended to connect refugees in Germany with private hosts. The project brought me into conversations with media, business, and government, including a presentation at CeBIT. It also taught me that meaningful products do not exist only as interfaces or technical systems. They operate inside legal, political, and institutional structures. That realization led me to study law at the University of Cologne on a Friedrich Naumann Foundation scholarship, work in mergers and acquisitions at GÖRG, intern in the German Bundestag (parliament), and go to the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law as a legal scholar under the recognised student programme.
Today, I bring those threads together through digital product design. I created Music Tools, an iOS app for musicians that moves essential utilities such as a tuner, metronome, pitch reference, and keyboard out of the traditional app container and into system-level surfaces including widgets, the Lock Screen, Control Center, Live Activities, and the Dynamic Island. Music Tools grew out of real musical practice, including my own experience singing with The Oxford Commas and the Chapel Choir of Wadham College. It has since been covered by outlets including TapSmart, Sheconomy, Illumulus, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, and Kölnische Rundschau, and has been recognized for its musician-centered interface architecture and technical execution.
Learn more about Music Tools
I also built experimental interface projects such as Mapography, a spatial portfolio app that turns biography into an interactive 3D map, and interaction concepts for folders and photo memories that explore how familiar systems can become more immediate, expressive, and humane.
Learn more about Mapography
Across these projects, the medium changes, but the underlying pattern stays the same. I invent tools that reduce friction between intent and action: a microscope that makes advanced research visible on a school budget, a flood barrier that activates itself, a music utility that is available at the exact moment a performer needs it, and interface systems that make complex digital spaces easier to understand.
For me, invention is not only the creation of something new. It is the discipline of making something newly usable.
Kilian