Wednesday, March 21, 2012

A very brief history of Point Nine

I just created a slide about the development of Point Nine Capital for a little company presentation and thought it might be useful if I posted it here as well to give everyone some information on where we're at and how we got there:


In 2008, Lukasz Gadowski – who almost everyone in the German Web startup scene knows because he built or helped build some of Europe's biggest Internet success stories, e.g. Spreadshirt, studiVZ and brands4friends – and Kolja Hebenstreit teamed up with Pawel Chudzinski and Steffen Hoellinger to create Team Europe Ventures (TEV). TEV had two purposes: Building companies and investing in other Internet startups. Since then, TEV has founded a number of highly successful Internet companies – DeliveryHero, DigitaleSeiten, ChicChickClub, madvertise and SponsorPay, to name just a few.

In 2009 TEV raised a ~ €6M fund, which was managed by Pawel and invested in 24 companies. 16 out of these 24 companies were co-investments with myself, some led by Pawel, some by me, some by both of us together. So as you can see, although we didn't formally set up a partnership until recently, we've worked together very closely in the last few years.

In 2011 we concluded that it's time to take our collaboration to the next level and Lukasz, Kolja, Pawel and I decided to create an independent investment firm called Point Nine Capital. In connection with this, the existing TEV fund has been renamed into Point Nine Capital Fund I. The new fund, called Point Nine Capital II, is now managed by Pawel and me, and we're also the biggest stakeholders. Lukasz and Kolja continue to run Team Europe, which is now exclusively focused on creating fast-growing Internet companies, and they also support us as Venture Partners.

Point Nine Capital II has made four investments already – one is a great Canadian SaaS startup called Jobber, the rest hasn't been announced yet – and we're looking forward to making many more investments in the coming months and years. Our focus continues to be on SaaS, marketplaces, lead generation, eCommerce and mobile. Additional information is available on our website, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask!


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