DGAP-News: German Startups Group Berlin GmbH & Co. KGaA / Key word(s): Investment German Startups Group increases its stake in the strongly growing portfolio companies Remerge and Wunder 10.11.2016 / 09:13 The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- +++ Press release +++ for immediate publication German Startups Group increases its stake in the strongly growing portfolio companies Remerge and Wunder - Majority holding Exozet fundamentally redevelops and redesigns ZDF media library - Portfolio company realbest triples its commission revenue in 2016 - Portfolio company Scalable Capital again chosen as test winner Berlin, 10 November 2016 - German Startups Group, the second most active venture capital investor in Germany in the time period since 2012 (CB Insights, 2015), increases its stake in the portfolio companies Remerge and Wunder. The company thereby consequently pursues its strategy to increase its stakes in startups that show particular potential. The AdTech startup Remerge, a stakeholding of particular significance to German Startups Group, enables app providers to place ads through an integrated retargeting platform in more than 350,000 other apps, according to the company. Thus, advertisers can reach, according to Remerge, up to 900,000 users worldwide per second. The addressed user target group can be defined in detail according to various criteria. This reduces scatter losses and therefore increases the advertiser's marketing impact as well as the revenue of the app publisher since higher click rates can be achieved through Remerge. Apps become increasingly more important as an advertising medium because of their enormous international prevalence on more than 2.5 billion smartphones worldwide. Remerge has achieved a growth in revenue of over 500% in the first three quarters of 2016 compared to last year's period, according to the company. The AdTech company's US business, which has been newly established in 2Q15, is developing excellently as well. By now, Remerge records higher revenues per month than in the entire year of 2015. The Berlin-based company is winner of the Angel's Choice Award of the Web Summit 2015 and one of the "3 Companies to Watch" according to Online Marketing Rockstars. Founded in 2013, Wunder, a portfolio company of German Startups Group, is by its own account the world's leading urban carpooling platform. Wunder focuses on the international metropolitan areas with the highest traffic density. The smartphone app enables private individuals to take along other persons who share the same commute in their cars and thus split the travelling costs. In return, the passengers can, at the cost of a ride by public transport, use a more comfortable means of transportation without effort. When compared against providers like Uber, passengers benefit from lower costs since the drivers travel the route anyways. Gunnar Froh, founder of Wunder, already has long-standing experience with successful sharing economy business models as the former Head of Germany and one of the first employees of Airbnb. Apart from Cherry Ventures and the US venture capital fund Blumberg Capital, Konstantin Sixt, member of the Management Board of Sixt, has co-invested in Wunder. The majority holding of German Startups Group, Exozet, has recently presented the results of the largest single contract in its company history: The Agency for Digital Transformation has conceived and developed the relaunch and the merger of the website and media library of the public service broadcaster ZDF. Using a new design, new user guidance, and significantly more and smarter features, the ZDFmediathek was redesigned from the ground up and adapted to the changing viewing habits. For example, personalised recommendations are given for logged-in users based on their usage history through an algorithm specifically developed for this purpose. The improved search feature also offers various semantic recommendation processes based on indexing and tagging services. Furthermore, the ZDFmediathek is completely responsive, meaning the layout is adjusted to the respective display of a smartphone, tablet, desktop computer, or smart TV, depending on the utilised device. This is made possible by Exozet's newly conceived backend that has been equipped with a system architecture that is based on microservices. Approximately one third of the ZDFmediathek's 45 million monthly visits are made via mobile devices. The Berlin-based agency will also support the broadcaster in the future to reposition itself in the digital market. realbest, a stakeholding of particular significance to German Startups Group, has tripled its net commission revenue in the time period from January to October 2016 compared to last year's first 10 months, according to its own account. In October 2016 alone, the real estate sales platform achieved commission revenues of 560k euros. realbest counts among the pioneers of the PropTech segment, under which technology companies within the real estate area are summarised. The robo advisor Scalable Capital, a focus investment of German Startups Group, was again chosen as test winner. In a comparison of eleven robo advisors on the basis of various criteria, such as performance or customer satisfaction, the info portal Brokervergleich.de classified Scalable Capital as the best robo advisor in Germany. The FinTech company has previously won the Angel's Choice Award of the Web Summit 2015, was awarded the grade "very good" by the finance magazine Euro am Sonntag in a test of online investment portals, and won the Innovation Award for the best automatic wealth management platform at the Börsentag 2016. Press contact German Startups Group Theo Bonick Tel: +49 30 6098890 84 Mail: [email protected] German Startups Group - We Love Startups! German Startups Group is a listed investment company based in Berlin that focuses on young, fast-growing companies, so-called startups. The company acquires majority and minority holdings mainly by providing venture capital. The portfolio companies that German Startups Group holds also stand to benefit from German Startups Group's expertise, experience and network with respect to strategy development, financing rounds, restructuring necessities, M&A transactions or selling the company, including a possible IPO. According to its own assessment, German Startups Group provides startups with so-called "smart money" by acquiring a holding. Its focus is on companies whose products or business models represent a disruptive innovation, allow for a high degree of scalability to be expected, and in which it has a great deal of trust in the entrepreneurial abilities of the founders to whom it feels that it obtains early access to due to its close relationships to relevant players in the startup scene. The geographical focus is on the German-speaking region. Since it commenced with operations in 2012, German Startups Group has in its opinion built up a diversified portfolio of investments in young companies and become the second most active venture capital investor in Germany since 2012 (CB Insights, Germany Venture Capital Overview). 25 of the 47 minority stakeholdings in operationally active companies are of particular significance to German Startups Group and together comprise 89% of the total value of all 47 active minority stakeholdings. The ten core holdings alone make up 61% of the value of all active minority stakeholdings. According to German Startups Group, its investment portfolio reflects a cross-section of promising German startups of various maturity stages ("Seed," "Early" and "Growth Stage," by German Startups Group's own definition) and includes some of the most successful and best known German startups. More information is available on our website at www.german-startups.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10.11.2016 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases. Archive at www.dgap.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 519355 10.11.2016