Mobile, Made in Berlin
This year Berlin joined the club: The first bonafide ‘unicorn’ emerged when Zalando went public in October. Since then DeliveryHero has joined the gang and SoundCloud might have by the time you read this, albeit both are still privately held. It’s actually quite fitting that the poster-child of this new era is an online (fashion) store, as the first wave of startups coming out of Berlin were mostly ecommerce plays. This is largely thanks to Rocket Internet (which IPO’d just one day after Zalando) and Team Europe, who both played major roles in the forming of this ecosystem, especially in the early days.
Probably because of the heavy marketing needs of these ecommerce companies, the next wave of companies was very advertising-heavy. As Pawel has pointed out before: We might have an Ad Cluster in Berlin.
Yet there is a lot more if you take a closer look. I got the feeling that there is a mobile wave emerging at the moment. Check out theses Berlin-based mobile companies:
Lovoo is a mobile-first dating app, that bootstrapped their way to 20M users internationally.
EyeEm is probably the best-known Instagram alternative out there and 10M (mobile) photographers think it is even better.
The popular to-do list Wunderlist hit 9M doers in October. It can also claim the first investment of VC behemoth Sequoia in a Berlin based company.
If you are into soccer, chances are that you are using OneFootball to keep a tap on your team. And so are 16M other fans.
Granted, Wooga might have started out a bit differently, but it is now a mobile-first gaming company with 50M monthly players.
Pretty impressive, no? But wait there are even more. While the above are the most mature mobile companies (that I found), there is a whole new generation, that has a lot of potential. Here are four that stuck out to me:
Clue helps women to track their menstrual cycle and gain insight into their body and fertility.
Although they just launched on iPhone a few months ago, Kitchen Stories is probably the most beautiful cooking app out there.
Okay, Number26 hasn’t launched yet, so this one is a bit of a stretch. But hey, a mobile-first bank account? Count me in!
Remerge gives all others on the list the ability to segment and then retarget their app users.
The momentum has really picked up in Berlin over the last few years and that’s awesome. Can mobile become the third leg of the Berlin tech ecosystem? Maybe. Let’s start founding more of them, invest in more of them and embrace the ones we have — then maybe we can get there. We at Point Nine are more than happy to support this trend where we can!
So why do I point these companies out?
I want more of them!
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