You may use something else in place of cash. But unless it's high-value goods or machinery, the general recommendation is that you take cash. The estimates are just too much hassle and when you get them wrong the tax office might intervene and that's something you might go to jail for since it may count as tax evasion. Now if you have an app that's worth a million bucks, go ahead...

Yes, but who evaluates how much it's worth? And why the hell should someone even have to be doing that? It's utterly useless bureaucracy. If the goal of having capital is to cover wages, say, should the company go under, then you should have that specific requirement, not some vague notion of 25K being a magical number.

I agree, but in the absence of a change in company law, the option to be able to satisfy it with intangibles is ok. I think so long as the valuation is reasonable, it counts. Any decent-sized app would easily cost >€25k, and even the website can cost that much in some cases. It's easy to discount the value of our own work, but we shouldn't.

Plus, instead of handing over the copyright to the company, it might be possible to do something like grant an exclusive license to the company instead.

The goal of having capital is if you order a bunch of Aereon chairs and fail to pay, or your delivery driver runs over someone, these folks have some hold of collecting because by law they can't come after you personally. $25k is an arbitrary number because it can't be anything but arbitrary in this situation.

Countries like the US, France and UK get by just fine without this requirement. The arbitrariness of the number is an indication that it's a bad idea: the number is too low to guarantee compensation in many situations, and adds another obstacle for would-be entrepreneurs, especially those who do not come from a well-to-do background.

Far better might be some transparency requirements.

Take the standard UG (haftungsbeschränkt) if you don't have the capital. There the base capital requirement is 1 Euro. You can even found a GbR which is not a limitied liability company but serves quite well in most standard cases.

In any case, the number is not too low to guarantee compensation: The base capital of the company is public. Every business person in Germany knows that number. So if you're trading with a fresh GmbH you can safely assume that at least 25k were available at some point. Excluding plain fraud, you can be pretty sure that at least bills in a given range can be paid from that capital. You'd have a second look if they try to order something which goes beyond their base capital. Transparency requirements don't help much with fresh companies since there is now history to judge from.