NEWS

Germany broadens Silicon Valley startup activities

German Vice Chancellor announces expansion of the German Silicon Valley Accelerator program

Sunnyvale, California – May 21, 2013

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The team of the German Silicon Valley Accelerator (GSVA) is excited to announce the expansion of its program, supported by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. The official announcement was made by Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister Dr. Philipp Rösler during his visit to Silicon Valley on Monday, May 20th in San Francisco. The expansion is a clear sign of the successful results the GSVA program has delivered since starting in 2012. Because of the increased number and quality of applying startups, the expansion was a logical step forward and gives the GSVA Team recognition for their outstanding work in support of German startups abroad. With the expansion of the program, GSVA will now be in a position to support double the amount of companies.

According to Dietmar Harhoff, Chairman of GSVA, “the program has seen a growth in applications of more than 30%” for its bi-annual selection process.”  Moreover, “we are also pleased that the quality of the applying startups has continuously improved”, Harhoff said.

With the additional number of startups now supported by the program, GSVA will also open a second location in San Francisco in addition to its current offices in Silicon Valley. For many of the startups focusing on consumer and mobile markets, working out of the San Francisco branch will offer the perfect environment and access to networks crucial for a successful development into leading companies.

The current group of GSVA participants includes pressrelease1Adtelligence, Azeti Networks, Celonis, Fruux and Mobile Event Guide who have joined the program in April and have celebrated initial successes in building partnerships, acquiring customers and setting up their U.S. subsidiaries since, all milestones in becoming global winning companies.

GSVA is looking forward to receiving the next round of great applications by August 31. The companies selected by the jury will then have the chance of rolling out their business on a global scale. Applications can be submitted at http://germanaccelerator.com/application/.

ABOUT GERMAN SILICON VALLEY ACCELERATOR:

The German Silicon Valley Accelerator (GSVA) is a three to six months acceleration program for German Information and Communication Technology startups in Silicon Valley. It is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi), the EXIST Program, and a variety of private sponsors, partners and donors. Its vision is to establish a permanent bridge between Germany and Silicon Valley that facilitates transatlantic startups, provides inspiration and drives innovation and research and development in Germany. Participation in the program is free of charge for all selected companies.

For more information and to submit an application visit http://germanaccelerator.com, engage on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/GSVAccelerator or follow us on Twitter @GSVAccelerator.

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Celonis wins Germany’s most prestigious award for hospital controlling

Software solution’s ability to  discover optimization potential in hospital management convinced jury

Celonis‘ Process Business Intelligence-solution Celonis Pathfinder has been awarded with the innovation prize 2013 of the German association for hospital controlling (DKVC). The jury handed the award to uhb consulting AG, Celonis‘ German distribution partner for software solutions in healthcare.

The DKVC-prize awards innovative projects in the healthcare industry that are considered a landmark in hospital controlling. A key element for the jury’s decision, consisting of DKCV’s management and its scientific advisory council. has been the success existing users of Celonis Pathfinder experienced in their projects. The jury highlighted the possibilities of the software to act as „X-ray device for IT driven processes“, visualizing optimization potential. The success stories of users pointing out the software’s benefit for hospital controlling were another crucial reason.

„We and our partner, uhb consulting AG, are very proud that we won the award”, says Alexander Rinke, Celonis’ co-founder and Managing Director. „Celonis Pathfinder is based on our ground-breaking technology Process Business Intelligence, which is designed for real-time analytics of IT driven processes. It enables users to mine all processes in their hospitals. The jury emphasized, that Celonis technology combines important elements of Business Intelligence and Business Process Management and creates, combined with Process Mining-algorithms, a yet unknown level of transparency for the customers.”

Celonis Pathfinder provides a complete and transparent visualization of patient pathways in a hospital. The actual treatment process can be reconstructed from hospital admission to the receipt of payment after an invoice has been issued. Inefficiencies on all structural levels become visible and the case by case analysis exposes critical issues – e.g. if invoicing takes too long, due to bottlenecks in the process. Celonis customers were able to realize savings of up to 30% of their process costs and tremendously improve service quality as well as compliance.

About Celonis

Celonis© is the world’s leading supplier of enterprise-ready process mining solutions. With its unique Process Business Intelligence technology, a complete solution uniting process mining and business intelligence, it offers the world’s most powerful tool for optimising IT-driven processes in businesses and other organisations.

Celonis PBI is a versatile, innovative, industry-independent analytics solution combining Process Mining and Business Intelligence. Celonis also offers three market-leading, turnkey solutions based on Process Business Intelligence for the IT service management, ERP systems and hospital management sectors:

Celonis Orchestra is an advanced tool for analysing service desk processes.

Celonis Discovery is an optimised process mining solution for analysing processes in ERP systems.

Celonis Pathfinder is a high-performance hospital management solution.

Siemens AG, Bayerische Rundfunk, Südwestrundfunk, Hessische Rundfunk, Westdeutsche Rundfunk and Norddeutsche Rundfunk have all concluded that Process Business Intelligence represents a standard technology for analysing process data and have placed their confidence in Celonis’ strength and capacity for innovation. Celonis GmbH is based in Munich.

Further information is available from www.celonis.de.

The trademarks or registered trademarks of Celonis GmbH in Germany and other countries include Celonis©. All related trademarks, trade names, logos, characters, design and trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of Celonis GmbH in Germany and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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New generation of entrepreneurs discovers “ecosystem of founding”

In Palo Alto, young entrepreneurs and experienced ones come together for “My Success. Our Visions.”

When it comes to start-ups and founding in Germany, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is: Europe probably has a long way to. The good news is: “The start-up scene in Germany is seeing a wonderful new generation.”

At least that is what Dirk Kanngiesser believes, CEO of the German Silicon Valley Accelerator (GSVA) and one of the opening speakers at “My Success. Our Visions.” in Palo Alto. The evening event is about both sides: entrepreneurs who have made it, talk about their challenges, and share best practices – and young founders who have come to the Silicon Valley for following their own path to success. Kanngießer and the team at GSVA invites those German Start-Ups to the Bay Area for three to sixth months, and help them “to get their feet on the ground” by bringing them together with potential customers, partners and investors.

IMG_20130508_192952“The start-up scene today in Germany breeds a very different kind of companies, much more diverse and probably a bit more hyped than 15 years ago”, said Kanngießer. He especially pointed to Berlin, which had earned “a beautiful reputation” for starting a business over the last years. Also, he hopes, exchange and cooperation is increasing between the two hotspots Berlin and Silicon Valley. A sure sign for that is the visit of German Federal Minister for Economics and Technology Philip Rösler in the middle of May, who will bring not the bosses of Siemens and ThyssenKrupp with him to the Valley, but 50 young entrepreneurs, who are only just starting.

Martin Sinner once started as a young founder, too – the longtime CEO of Idealo Internet GmbH was representing the “My Success” part of the event. Sinner managed to develop Idealo to one of the leading price comparison companies, despite a horrifying market situation in 2001 after the “New Market Crash”. Back then, “an ecosystem of founding almost didn’t exist in Germany”, Sinner said. “Also, no angel investors, no ecosystem of building web-portals.” So Idealo ran quickly out of money. Sinner had to take a day job, eventually managing his own company only after 7 p.m. But he didn’t give up. Hitting rock bottom eventually turned out to be the key to success. “We really had to look for ways to activate customers for low cost, and it was a great time for doing that.” After all, Google was coming up, and Sinner realized that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was a great source for the traffic he needed so badly – and for money. “And suddenly we got it”, Sinner remembered. From then on Idealo grew on average 40 percent a year, eventually being bought by Axel Springer in 2009.

Anna Kendeva, CTO of “Mobile Event Guide”, was speaking on behalf of the “Our Visions” part. Her mobile apps guide visitors through big events like conferences or trade-shows. “Imagine you can send your showcase or whitepaper to everyone who joins a particular session”, Kendeva explains the functionalities. “The organizers on the other hand can generate additional value through sponsorship and advertisement.” As the US is the biggest market for events, Mobile Event Guide hopes to set foot here too.

IMG_20130508_183819Bastian Nominacher, founder of Celonis, is also attracted by the attractive business opportunities he sees in the Silicon Valley. Celonis has developed a technology called process mining, which analyzes big data, visualizing business processes running on SAP-systems with a few mouse clicks. Siemens, one of the first customers, uses it to advance its internal compliance, by analyzing the streams of orders, payments and revenues. “Our technology can be applied in a variety of fields”, Nominacher said, “in hospitals, manufacturing, the IT service management space”. As his company is growing, he plans on recruiting a team on the U.S. west coast to “serve the biggest market for business analytics”.

“There’s such a good ecosystem around founding here”, Martin Sinner concluded. “If you go to Stanford, there are classes for every student about entrepreneurship.” And the German Silicon Valley Accelerator allows some of the best German startups to tap this unique ecosystem.

Guest article by Christoph Behrens

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Celebrating Innovation in 4th Generation – German startups get selected to join the GSVA program in Q3 / Q4 2013

For the fourth time already, German entrepreneurs from the information and communication technology sector get the chance to explore Silicon Valley and the U.S. market for three months. They receive an introduction to the structures of the world’s leading technology market and can focus on areas such as business development, marketing and sales. The stay can be extended for further three months in case of a very promising prospect.

The German Silicon Valley Accelerator is pleased to announce this year’s winners. Out of 63 applications, we proudly present a line-up of twelve startups that will make the journey to Silicon Valley:

• Abusix: global reporting of network abuse
• Tadaa: photo sharing app
• Plista: online marketing network
• Lovoo:online dating app
• Smarchive: document filing software
• Shopgate: online shopping app
• JC Analytics: app for financial analysis
• MeasurePhone: measuring app
• Tazaldoo: social media research tools
• Plug Surfing: social network for electric mobility
• Zertisa: software platform for Android devices
• Ebuggy: electric cars

The networking event of the GSVA – „Celebrating Innovation“ – provided the festive setting for the announcement of the winning teams. After Events in Palo Alto, Berlin and Munich, Hamburg was the place to meet for inspiring talents, international investors and representatives from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology on 11th April 2013 this year.

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Interview with Lars Hinrichs
 
 
 

 
 
 

At the height of the event, the winners of this year’s application round of the GSVA were announced.

Another highlight was the interview with Lars Hinrichs, founder of the network platform XING and currently “Executive Geek” at HackFWD. He pointed out what considerable innovation potential slumbers within the digital sector: “We have 130 market leaders in the mittelstand but none in digi-tal.” Lars Hinrichs relies on GSVA:”I hope GSVA will help in marketing, fiercely help in selling the company.” He encouraged entrepreneurs to think big: “Try to be different and try to be innovative – go where nobody has been.”

The next application round for a stay in the Silicon Valley in the first half of 2014 is open until 31st August 2013.

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Signavio invests

 

Signavio

 

Effektif: BPM veteran Tom Baeyens takes off to the cloud by securing Euro 1.2m funding by Signavio

SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Tom Baeyens, inventor of the widely used Open Source projects jBPM® (part of JBoss®, acquired by Red Hat, Inc.) and Activiti® (now part of Alfresco Software, Inc.) today announced Effektif, a new cloud-based Business Process Management (BPM) solution for process automation. Signavio provides funding and leverages its marketing and sales channels to boost Effektif’s growth.

“jBPM and Activiti are powerful on-premise BPM stacks that are used globally. Seeking a shift towards the cloud, I decided to leave the Activiti project late last year and start Effektif,” Tom Baeyens, CEO of Effektif, explains.

Unlike many other BPM suites, Effektif targets the business user directly by allowing the implementation of people-centric business processes very quickly. Effektif combines the best of BPM and collaboration tools while leveraging existing email infrastructure, rather than replacing it. With its cloud-only approach and pay-per-use pricing, Effektif’s SaaS based solution lowers the entry barrier to BPM automation and is suitable for both large and small processes.

“Using his expertise in mission-critical business operations technology, Tom has built two of the world’s leading automation platforms. He is a widely recognized leader in the BPM space,” Gero Decker, Co-CEO of Signavio, says. “We were looking for a cloud-based process automation framework to complement our product for some time. The combination of Effektif and Signavio now provides both small and large enterprises with a completely new way to automate their processes.”

Signavio is investing €1.2m in Effektif to accelerate product development and establish sales operations worldwide. “It is not only the capital investment and modeling technology that makes Signavio’s participation so compelling, but also their experience in building a high growth BPM company,” Tom Baeyens says. Some of Signavio’s HTML5 and user experience experts will join the Effektif team. “Their expertise in delivering a highly reliable and easy-to-use cloud (SaaS) platform for business users was also an important consideration. We are both thrilled about the opportunity to improve how work is done, one process at a time.”

 

Red Hat, jBPM and JBoss are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc.
Activiti and Alfresco are registered trademarks of Alfresco Software, Inc.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Effektif
Effektif was founded by Tom Baeyens in Belgium in December 2012. The company provides a BPM solution in the cloud that allows business users to implement their processes in minutes. As part of the Signavio investment, Effektif relocated to Berlin, Germany and Torben Schreiter, Co-CEO of Signavio, joined Effektif’s board of directors. www.effektif.com

About Signavio
Signavio is a Berlin and Silicon Valley-based cloud provider in the BPM space. Founded in 2009, the company’s 40 employees serve more than 400 customers worldwide. The Signavio Process Editor is a collaborative business process modeling tool that makes it easy to get all stakeholders involved in process design and improvement. With innovative products such as QuickModel, Signavio is a recognized leader and award-winning software provider.

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German Minister of Economy and Trade visits GSVA – the program is successfully working for one year now!

It has been now about one year that the German Silicon Valley Accelerator started its work – taking German startups over the ocean and introducing them to Silicon Valley. To celebrate this we had the honor to welcome the German Minister of Economy and Trade, Dr. Philipp Rösler, at the GSVA offices. He was accompanied by German journalists (BILD, Spiegel, Wirtschaftswoche, Handelsblatt and Focus) as well as representatives of the German digital economy, for example Felix Haas or Jörg Bienert from Parstream. This company also participated in the GSVA program and received a 5,6 mio USD funding by Khosla Ventures. The Minister talked with the startups that actually are in the Valley and the program, such as Trademob, Roombeats, Itembase and HoneyTracks. As he expressed in his speech: “I want the next Apple to come from Germany!” Years ago it was people like Siemens, Bayer, Henkel or Daimler that had their visions, lived their dream and created a company. Now its our generation.

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2nd edition of My Success. Our Visions.

More than 80 attendees took part of the second edition of My Success. Our Visions.

This time it took place at the Deutsche Telekom office in Mountain View. Thomas Hessler, co-founder of Zanox and CEO of Globumbus, shared his three success secrets

1.Make Meaning 2.Share & Collaborate 3.Think Big

Every quarter, “My success. Our visions” will invite one individual who has made it in Silicon Valley to share his/her learning and path to success.

Further, the series welcomed our new companies MobileBits, Customer Alliance and VI-Systems who joined the German Accelerator program in September as well as the fast track company Trademob and introduced them to the GSVA, GACC, GTAI and GABA networks.

Deutsche Telekom earns a special thank for making this event possible.   

Thomas’ speech and an article of Yvonne from t3n.de

 

 

 

 

 

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Trademob Raises $15 Million in Series B Funding

Press Release

German Silicon Valley Accelerator startup Trademob Raises $15 Million in Series B Funding

Global expansion on top of agenda for leading mobile app marketing platform

Sunnyvale, California – November 13, 2012

The German Silicon Valley Accelerator (GSVA) is proud to announce that Trademob – one of the German startups selected to participate in its Silicon Valley based acceleration program – has successfully secured a Series B financing round of $15M. The round is being led by Kennet Partners, a technology growth equity investor with offices in Silicon Valley and London, who are investing $12.5M. Existing Trademob investors Tengelmann Ventures and High‐Tech Gründerfonds are also investors in the second round providing the additional $2.5M. The financing will be used to fund Trademob’s continued global expansion and for further investment in it’s proprietary technology platform.

“The Trademob team is truly entrepreneurial,” said Eric Muller, Steering Committee member and Chairman of the Mentors for GSVA. “First, they anticipated the tectonic shift in advertising budgets toward mobile. Second, they developed a world-class technology to overcome the raft of challenges unique to mobile advertising. Lastly – and maybe most importantly – Trademob has remained laser focused on delivering measurable results for customers.”


The Trademob platform allows advertising campaigns for mobile apps to be tracked and optimized in real-time from source to download and through to in-app activity. This directly boosts the number of active users, in-app engagement, ratings within app stores, and ROI in general.

Ravi Kamran, CEO of Trademob: “We are passionate about delivering great results for our mobile advertisers. It is fun because we see how our platform can really move the needle for our clients. As we look to grow in the US and beyond, the German Silicon Valley Accelerator is a great partner and support structure for us. The GSVA network is able to put us in contact with exactly the right people. But even more than this, the GSVA team provides insider council and makes sure we are tuned in to the ‘Silicon Valley’ way of doing things.”

“We’re thrilled to be supporting Trademob,” said Dirk Kanngiesser, CEO of GSVA. “Ravi and his team have achieved amazing growth since launching their service in Europe just a little more than a year ago. The other thing that bodes well for Trademob’s US expansion is that they’ve come to Silicon Valley well informed and prepared to respond to competitive pressures. They really have that no-excuses, get-it-done, fire-in-the-belly attitude you like to see. This level of energy and ambition is often what makes the difference between great success and failure.”

Since officially launching its app marketing offering in late 2011, Trademob has experienced double-digit monthly revenue growth and has rapidly become one of the leading app marketing platforms in Europe.

 

About Trademob:

Berlin‐based Trademob Berlin‐based Trademob is a data-¬driven mobile app marketing platform led by technology entrepreneurs and maths experts. Founded in August 2010, Trademob offers its clients an easy and efficient opportunity to promote their mobile apps globally while optimizing mobile marketing goals and budgets. Trademob’s optimization engine and data-driven approach maximize active app users, in‐app engagement and mobile revenue. The company’s independent platform aggregates all relevant ad networks and reaches more than 500 million mobile users worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.trademob.com.

About German Silicon Valley Accelerator:

The German Silicon Valley Accelerator (GSVA) provides a three to six month acceleration program for high-potential German IT startups seeking to launch US operations and build a presence in the heart of Silicon Valley. Supported by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi), the EXIST Program, and private partners, the GSVA’s vision is to establish a well-traveled, bi-directional bridge between Germany and Silicon Valley fostering innovation, R&D, and entrepreneurship in Germany. Selected startups participate free. Find out more at germanaccelerator.com or facebook.com/GSVAccelerator or on Twitter at @GSVAccelerator

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