Sturm was a Bavarian noble's son given by his father to Boniface to be raised at the monastic school of Fritzlar. He grew to be Boniface's closest German-born disciple. In 744 Boniface sent him to scout the wilderness for a new central abbey; after two journeys he found a site in the Buchonia forest by the river Fulda, where on March 12, 744, he founded with seven monks the Abbey of Fulda — destined to become the most important monastery in medieval Germany.
He traveled to Italy in 747 to study the original Benedictine observance at Monte Cassino. Returning to Fulda he applied the strict Italian Rule to the community and built it into a great center of learning and missionary work. His abbey received as its first burial that of Boniface himself in 754, after his martyrdom in Frisia — and the Boniface tomb established Fulda's permanent religious centrality in Germany.
He was sent twice by Charlemagne to lead the Saxon mission in the 770s. The Saxons captured and tortured him; he returned to Fulda to die in 779. His Life by his disciple Eigil is one of the principal sources for the early Carolingian monastic culture.