Hi, welcome to Project A!
Today I am going to tell you about our new
investments, about how we supported our ventures
operationally and what we think are some of
the next big trends and opportunities.
My name is Anton Waitz, I am one of the partners
at Project A, and this is A Update - the 2nd
edition of our Newsletter Video.
We invested in Lampenwelt, Europe’s leading
online retailer in the lighting space.
Lampenwelt combines everything that we look
for when we do private equity co-investments:
a strong founder-led management team, significant
profitable growth, and ample opportunities
to further scale.
The company is owned by London-based private
equity group 3i, and we are super excited
to invest with those guys.
We made two more investments that are just
not ready to announce today, but I can tell
you the one is empowering shopkeepers in sub-saharan
Africa, and the other one is all about opinions.
I hope we made you curious.
Last but not least, we have seen some great
financing events in our portfolio.
Qunomedical, Gabi, CrossEngage, and WorldRemit
have all all raised new money with significant
value uplifts.
WorldRemit, for example, is now worth more
than €600 million.
Guys, we really appreciate all your hard work!
Over the last months, our team of around 100
experts supported more than 20 of our portfolio
companies operationally.
Our software engineers, for example, supported
kfzteile24- the online market leader for automobile
parts in Germany.
The engineers helped kfzteile24 to transform
its online shop into a modern, flexible microservice-based
architecture.
The new shop is now based on a scalable infrastructure
stack from Docker and Kubernetes and the latest
frontend and backend technology.
Or in short: Users of kfzteile24 are now enjoying
the best user experience possible.
As another example of our operational support:
we worked with Contorion.
As some of you might have heard, earlier this
year we successfully exited Contorion.
But we still keep on working with our friends.
This time we produced a video that reached
more than one million people on social media.
Quite some views for a video in German language.
In terms of trends, we’re seeing an increasing
number of German top tech-talents turning
startup entrepreneur.
More and more graduates from our best universities
like Munich, Karlsruhe, or Aachen are not
blindly following the corporate track anymore
and joining the BMW’s, Siemens’, or Bosch’s
of this world.
But they are actually getting bold and risk-friendly
enough to start their own businesses around
the smart algorithms and the creative tech
stacks they are building.
Industry 4.0 has become a bit of a buzzword
right now, but the buzz is actually real.
We are seeing great companies of bold, ambitious
entrepreneurs using sensor technology, machine
learning or computer vision to tackle complex
problems in very heavy industries.
Such as automotive, manufacturing or energy.
We are being super excited about this development
because we believe this is just the beginning
of something larger.
We know that Germany is unlikely to produce
the next Facebook, but we are very much convinced
that the next SAP is gonna be created here.
So stay tuned and stay in touch in 2018.
Project A wishes you a very Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year.
