From the field. For the field.

Darkbird grew out of a family business in the security industry: Michael Mundt, father of founder Tobias Mundt, has worked in the guarding trade since the 1980s and ran his own security company from 1997. The business was a topic at every family gathering – the industry simply came with the kitchen table.

Tobias Mundt himself has worked in the family business since 1999: while still at school he stood guard duty in parallel – on weekends and during the holidays. After his final exams came a year of military service, followed by an apprenticeship as an IT specialist in application development alongside a bachelor's degree in computer science at the FernUniversität in Hagen. Throughout that time the guarding work always ran in parallel: as a guard, alarm response and mobile patrol driver – night shifts included.

Software was always career path number one, guarding the constant companion – up to founding his first own company in 2005. From then on he developed software for several major German corporations, while the everyday life of the family firm remained part of his own. This combination – software development as a profession, the security industry as everyday reality – is the foundation of Darkbird.

In 2011 he was appointed to operations management to take over a major customer – and learned the business from the inside: operations, staffing, wages, the monitoring centre. A year later he set out to bring the old DOS payroll software, Excel sheets and paper rosters into the digital age. Out of that task Darkbird was born – built in live operation, with and at a handful of core customers from the guarding industry. Darkbird has been offered as an online platform since 2014; Darkbird GmbH was founded in 2020. The standard has been the same ever since: from the field, for the field.