Finding the right partner
“We won through in the end,” claimed Marco Köhler, Managing Director of Cruso Systems GmbH. This young startup has made a name for itself with the development of the first mobile GPS city guide for pedestrians. The road was not easy: The development of a technology and its first launch as a product are worlds apart. Although the Science City Adlershof, where “the Cruso” was born, was developed to a great extent with public funds, different rules apply to company founders.
When faced with the two financing options – bank or venture capital – the Cruso team chose the latter. The founders of this spinoff from the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Engineering FIRST struck lucky after they “had had a tough time with the banks”. In the Berlin estate agent Matthias Kopp they found a business angel who accompanied the scientists on their “road to learning the ropes”. After that, according to Köhler, it was really the classical route, and he listed the various stations: capital, reconstruction loan corporation, innovation funds and two further capital increases until the product finally became marketable.
What Köhler describes as a difficult road, but at the same time accepts with pride, Dr Joachim Rautter would place in the category of meticulous selection. A physics graduate he is the director of investment management at Peppermint Financial Partners and sees things “from the other side”. His company holds 25% of the Adlershof biochip producer Scienion AG, a spinoff from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. His objective is to arrive back at the “exit” after eight years of supervision, i.e. to discharge the company into financial and operative independence.
At the Adlershof location Rautter sees perfectly interesting startups. At Peppermint the choice is made with due consideration: Not only the business idea must be promising. “We too want to understand enough of the subject if we are to provide qualified advice.” This makes it clear what the laborious search for a financing solution is ultimately about: Finding the right partner for the project.