Re-engaging with an old friend: verwandt.de Series B Round

As the press has already let everyone know, we invested a further round at verwandt.de, our portfolio company with a platform for generating, managing and interacting with family trees. This additional capital will finance the further international expansion of this platform. As one can see from the growth they've had, we are quite excited about what Sven and Daniel have been able to do with limited resources. I remain just as excited now about their potential as I did at the initial investment six months ago.  Now they have the capital to execute even better on their strategy.

With the expansion into further regions, I see this platform becoming ever more useful as families extend beyond one language and geography. This makes verwandt.de all the more compelling for a user who now doesn't have to worry about his or her tree hitting a roadblock due to langauge barriers. The main hurdle remains "stickiness" as Sven already mentioned in his response on the comments to the TechCrunch post. Hence, there are upcoming features which will address this.

At the same time, I am glad to have co-invested along with Hasso Plattner Ventures (HPV). The "old friend" as many may think is not Hasso himself but Eran Davidson as well as Rouven Westphal (too bad we didn't have Hasso directly involved in making the investment...that would have been interesting). I have known Eran since he started setting up HPV way back when and he has become a good friend. I met Rouven when he was still the CFO at Exasol, a company I looked at when running SAP Ventures in Europe. The process with HPV was very streamlined and there were surpisingly few hiccups. It's nice to come full circle in some sense of having co-invested with Hasso's fund having earlier worked at SAP. It is a small world.

Note: Lisa, when are we sharing the next deal?

Comments

[Lisa]

We need to find that perfect cross-border deal! Newsgator is expanding in Europe (and skiing in The Rockies is fantastic this time of year) so come on over to Denver and I will introduce you to the team.

[Paul]

That's tempting!

[Stefan]

Thanks for publishing!