Munich The list of investors in the software company Remberg reads like a who’s who of the German start-up scene. After the latest round of financing, five founders of start-ups with a valuation in the billions belong to the group of investors, including Personio boss Hanno Renner and Celonis founder Bastian Nominacher.
“It’s a reassuring feeling when successful founders are convinced that we’re on the right track,” Remberg founder David Hahn told Handelsblatt.
Remberg wants to help medium-sized machine builders with digitization. The company has developed a kind of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software for the increasingly important following-sales service. The stock of machines, systems and vehicles is recorded, as well as service appointments and spare parts orders.
When you go to trade fairs, every machine is connected to the Internet of Things and can be maintained remotely, for example. “The reality is often very different,” says Hahn.
Manufacturers have often not even digitally recorded where their thousands of machines are in use worldwide. “As long as the field service, such as a service technician in a medium-sized company, still fills out reports on paper and employees in customer service do not have a central ticketing system, we do not need to come here with predictive maintenance and IoT.”
So Remberg – an artificial name that is intended to inspire confidence in the often rather conservative customers – wants to develop a completely new market. “The biggest competitors are paper, Excel and the status quo.” The market has a potential of billions. Almost half a million machines and systems are already managed with the platform.
“In service, the processes have to go away from paper”
In a first step, the Remberg software pulls all master data regarding machines and systems from existing IT systems to give users an overview of their inventory in the cloud. In this way, they can also digitize processes in service, and later also sales and marketing related to their equipment.
This business model reminded Hanno Renner, one of the most successful German founders to date, of his early days. His company Personio has developed software for human resources in small and medium-sized companies.
“Before we might start with automation in human resources, we had to get rid of Excel for vacation times, for example,” says Renner. “In service, too, the processes have to get away from paper.” Small and medium-sized companies in particular often lack a basis, and Remberg has understood exactly that.
So Renner, whose Personio was valued at more than six billion dollars in the last financing round, invested in Remberg early on. There he met other successful founders.
In the new round of financing, Bastian Nominacher is now also joining as an investor. He co-founded the data analytics specialist Celonis, Germany’s first Decacorn with a two-digit billion valuation at more than ten billion dollars.
Another prominent investor is Daniel Dines through VC firm Crew Capital. He founded UiPath. The automation provider from Romania, which is now listed on the stock exchange, was one of the first European start-ups to reach a double-digit billion valuation.
Personio co-founder Roman Schumacher and Michael Wax, founder of the logistics company Forto, which is also a unicorn, also invested in Remberg.
There are also Julian Lange, CFO of the unicorn Aiven, and Mirko Novakovic, who, according to industry estimates, sold his tech start-up Instana to IBM for half a billion dollars. The four founders of the sensor specialist Konux and Andrej Henkler, a former investor at Palantir, also invested in Remberg.
Founders invest in the next generation
Hahn says that if he has a sleepless night because of a problem, he can call one of his business angels. When it came to acquiring new investors, he contacted Renner, and Wax helped set up sales with the Forto blueprint.
That’s how it works for many start-ups at the moment. “In my view, it is a very good sign for the further development of the ecosystem in Germany that increasingly successful founders are investing in the next generation,” says Carsten Rudolph, Managing Director of the BayStartup investor network. For the young companies, this has “the invaluable advantage that they have investors on board who are really familiar with all the customs of the start-up scene and usually also have a very good network”.
If proven founders are on board, even established VC companies are more likely to dare to invest. For example, BMW i Ventures, the VC offshoot of BMW, ignored the German market for a long time and primarily invested in Silicon Valley and Israel, for example.
But they now want to become more involved in Germany, said Kasper Sage, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures, recently to the Handelsblatt. This is also due to the fact that more and more serial founders and business angels are now passing on their experiences.
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Remberg has recently tripled sales, which according to industry estimates should be in the seven-digit range this year. “We want to maintain the high pace,” says Hahn. “Our goal is to help companies worldwide to become digital champions in the age of IoT.”
Remberg has now collected eleven million euros in the Series A round of financing. The round is led by Earlybird, with participation from previous investors Speedinvest and Fly Ventures. Personio founder Renner was already involved in the 2019 seed financing round, and Nominacher is now a newcomer.
Hahn and his co-founders Julian Madrzak, Hagen Schmidtchen and Cecil Wöbker met at the start-up hotbed CDTM (Center for Digital Technology & Management), a joint institute of the two Munich universities.
Schmidtchen and Hahn had already worked for Vodafone in the field of artificial intelligence before the company was founded. Before Remberg, Wöbker was at MIT in Boston for a research stay, Madrzak was active in product management at Celonis – he later put him in touch with Nominacher.
The proceeds from the round of financing will now be used to further develop the technology and expand sales. Successful founders like Nominacher and Renner can help with the question of how best to proceed. “It’s wonderful,” says Hahn, “how the ecosystem works.”
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