This Month in German Startups - June 2021

07/01/21 • 22 min

Security Sutra - Cybersecurity Startups and Venture Capital

Welcome to This Month in German Startups June 2021 by Startuprad.io - in a news recording with Chris (Back Home in New York) and me Joe, from Frankfurt am Main.

We are reporting live from Germany’s largest unicorn wave ever. We announce two new unicorns (Scalable Capital and Forto (formerly FreightHub)) and Germany’s first Decacorn Celonis, valued at more than 11 bn US$. The 2019 Unicorn Wefox raises large funding of 536 mn € (650 mn US$). About You IPOs for 23 €/share at 4 bn Euro (4.85 bn US$) AND Austria becomes a new most valuable startup with GoStudent (1.4 bn €, 1.67 bn US$), after they had their first unicorn only last month.

Plus SolarisBank is rumored to be in talks of a 100 mn Euro VC Deal, which would make them a unicorn as well, to buy up a competitor. Especially active in this frenzy of unicorn creation is Softbank from Japan and Tencent from China.

We have a special episode on the unparalleled unicorn creation, which is available on the same channels. If you want to know more about the new Decacorn and unicorns in Germany and Austria you want to listen to this episode as well. We keep here the coverage of unicorns to a minimum.

Note: This will be the last news recording before the summer break. There will be no regular news in July or August, but we will be back with news at the end of September, wrapping up the summer news.

We are soooooooooo looking forward to the summer that Joe even wears a Hawaii shirt. Be happy for your eyes if you are only listening to this podcast :-)

Subscribe Here

Find all options to subscribe to our newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel or listen to our internet radio station here: Linkhttps://linktr.ee/startupradio

Find all links, texts, and show notes here on our blog post: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/this-month-in-german-startups-june-2021/

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This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podder - https://www.podderapp.com/privacy-policy
Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Welcome to This Month in German Startups June 2021 by Startuprad.io - in a news recording with Chris (Back Home in New York) and me Joe, from Frankfurt am Main.

We are soooooooooo looking forward to the summer that Joe even wears a Hawaii shirt. Be happy for your eyes if you are only listening to this podcast :-)

Subscribe Here

Find all options to subscribe to our newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel or listen to our internet radio station here: Linkhttps://linktr.ee/startupradio

Find all links, texts, and show notes here on our blog post: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/this-month-in-german-startups-june-2021/

---

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/securitysutra/message

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podder - https://www.podderapp.com/privacy-policy
Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Previous Episode

Bonus: This Month in German Startups – Unicorn Stampede

Welcome to This Month in German Startups by Startuprad.io – in a news recording with Chris (from New York City) and me Joe (from Frankfurt am Main).

This is a Bonus Episode covering the Unicorn Stampede in German-speaking countries. This recording is from June 29th, 2021 and all-new unicorns, formed afterward will be covered in our next news podcast, to be published End of September!

You may remember that we had another bonus episode last month covering the rise of Berlin-based fintech Trade Republic to become Germany’s most valuable startup? There is already a new king in the country with Celonis becoming Germany’s first Decacorn (valuation above 10 bn US$, here even 11bn US$). We also see that all of these monster fundings are driven by international investors, especially Softbank from Japan and Tencent from China.

Find all links and show notes on our blog post here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/bonus-this-month-in-german-startups-unicorn-stampede/

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Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/securitysutra/message

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podder - https://www.podderapp.com/privacy-policy
Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Next Episode

IDnow talks about their acquisition of Ariadnext

IDnow talks about their acquisition of Ariadnext We are growing organically 50-60% year over year right now organically. Andreas Bodczek, CEO IDnow

Media Partnership with Munich Startup

Munich Startup is the official startup portal for Munich and the surrounding region. It was developed by the City of Munich, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry for Munich and Upper Bavaria and the four entrepreneurship centers of the Munich universities within the framework of the Entrepreneurship Strategy Munich. You can learn more here: https://en.munich-startup.de/

The CEO

This time we have a rarity on our channel because Andreas Bodczek (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreasbodczek/) is not a founder, but an early investor in the company, which became later the CEO of IDnow. Andreas has been an early business angel, investing in IDnow. So he has been involved in the company for quite some time before he took the job as external CEO.

Andreas has been with Bertelsmann, where he worked with dial-up internet connections, building one of the broadest platforms for broadband and Voice-over-IP services in Germany. He later moved to become the CEO of Telefonica Germany (https://www.telefonica.de/) and co-founded Fyber (https://www.fyber.com/ ), which they build up in Germany, the US, and several more companies. They sold the company in 2014.

Andreas is also a board partner with Point Nine Capital (https://www.pointnine.com/), a Berlin-based VC fund focused on platforms and SaaS.

We will conclude most of the integration work streams of Identity TM at the end of this year. Andreas Bodczek, CEO IDnow The Startup

IDnow (https://www.idnow.io/products/idnow-videoident/) is an online identification service provider, that helps banks, insurance companies, and other companies to verify the identity of their clients remotely. This has not always been the case in Germany, but IDnow was one of the early companies providing this service.

Today IDnow has amongst their clients some well-known names like N26, Solaris Bank or Sixt, Western Union, Tier Mobility, and WeFox.

The startup grew early with a strong focus on financial services companies, starting when the German regulator moved to allow so-called “video idents.”

Now IDnow extends its services across industries, products, and countries. The acquisition of France-based Ariadnext (https://www.ariadnext.com/) fits in the category of extending in countries, to expand their footprint in France.

SPAC Deal?

From our conversation, we took that IDnow has SPAC offers at hand, still evaluating their options.

Find all links and show notes here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/exclusive-idnow-talks-about-their-acquisition-of-ariadnext/

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Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/securitysutra/message

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podder - https://www.podderapp.com/privacy-policy
Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy