Team Europe Ventures
Venture Capital and more
We found Internet startups!
The core business of Team Europe Ventures is to start Internet companies. Together with potential (co-)founders, we explore and develop business ideas with the explicit intention of starting new ventures.
When starting a company we see ourselves as a partner who actively works on the business model and pushes it ahead. When founding with us, entrepreneurs benefit from our wide ranging experience and know-how from numerous company-foundations, investments and exits. As well as from our far-reaching network of contacts.
When starting new companies, we believe there are four key success factors:
- Idea/Strategy
- Team
- Reach
- Financing
At Team Europe Ventures we have expertise, directly or indirectly through our network of contacts, in all of these areas. We have brought together a team of venture partners, analysts, HR-experts, as well as online-marketing, product and technnical managers.
In addition, startups founded as part of our company-building activities benefit from a great infrastracture – right from day one. This includes, but is not limited to, premises, furnishing, IT equipment and optimised internal processes. The sorts of things most startups, in the beginning, normally do not have access to.
With the environment we have created at Team Europe Ventures, we provide founders the opportunity to work in a highly-professional organisation ... immediately! This allows entrepreneurs to focus and concentrate on what matters most: making the business model a success.
How can I work with Team Europe Ventures?
By founding! If you have a great startup ideaand are a founding team or a single founder and need support in one or more of Team Europe Ventures areas of expertise, then get in touch. It’s that simple.
E-Mail Kolja at entrepreneur(please add @ here)teameurope.net.
Work for us! Within our company-building activities and our portfolio of companies we offer numerous opportunities to join the exciting world of startups. Whether you are an intern or trainee, a specialist in marketing or an experienced executive: we are always looking for highly-talented people!
For more details on current opportunities, please visit our career section.
Käuferportal - Robin Behlau and Mario Kohle From lecture hall to company building
Directly after leaving university, Robin Behlau and Mario Kohle contacted Team Europe Ventures with a business idea. After detailed analyses they decided together with Team Europe not to pursue their initial model. However, since Team Europe was immediately and totally convinced of ’s potential, both sides agreed on finding another business for the two young entrepreneurs.
So it came to be that in July 2008 Käuferportal was founded. Käuferportal is an online service providing a solution to problems that SMEs have with purchasing capital goods. Team Europe Ventures mainly supported in the early stages with financing, strategy and team building.
Today Käuferportal employs about 30 people and is the leading procurement plattform for capital goods in Germany.
Mister Spex - Dirk Graber From consultancy to internet entrepreneurship
Dirk Graber met his old student friend Lukasz Gadowski on a plane while still a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). After a short chat about the good old times, they figured out that Dirk was looking for new challenges and could imagine himself starting a new company.
Shortly after this episode and with all parties feeling confident that there was an untapped market for selling designer glasses and contact lenses online, in December 2007, Mister Spex was born. Team Europe Ventures completed the founding team and backed the startup with financing, strategy, distribution and online marketing.
Today Mister Spex is the leading online retailer for designer glasses in Germany with more than 150,000 customers. Mister Spex currently employs about 80 people.
SponsorPay - Andreas Bodczek From telecommunications manager to virtual monetisation
After graduating Andreas Bodczek started his career at the IT network service provider Bertelsmann mediaways in 1999. After a two year period as the CEO of Telefonica UK, Andreas became CEO of Telefonica Germany being responsible for the landline B2B business. In this position he also participated in the successful merger with o2, which was the basis for the first integrated mobile and landline provider in Europe.
After leaving Telefonica in 2007, Andreas worked together with a number of private equity and venture capital investors and this led to him getting in touch with Team Europe Ventures.
In 2009 Andreas Bodczek, Jan Beckers, Janis Zeck and Team Europe Ventures founded SponsorPay. The young company has big aims: to become Europe’s market leader in monetisation of virtual goods through advertising.
Team Europe Ventures supported SponsorPay with business model development, financing and strategy and tapped its wide-ranging network of contacts to help with the acquisition of the initial publishers and advertisers.
Today SponsorPay is Europe’s leading provider in the monetisation of online games through advertising and has already acquired its biggest competitor GratisPay. SponsorPay has more than 50 employees in several offices in Europe and the US.
Spreadshirt - Matthias Spieß From startup-gravedigger to Spreadshirt-CTO
After the first internet bubble-burst in 2000/2001 Matthias Spieß documented the death of internet startups with his project "Dotcomtod".
With Dotcomtod being one of Spreadshirt’s first shop partners (the 7th to be exact), Matthias wasn’t satisfied with Spreadshirt’s technical performance. This ended with Matthias joining Lukasz Gadowski as co-founder and CTO of Spreadshirt. From then on Matthias supported Spreadshirt in conceptualising and building up the technical infrastructure.
Today as CTO, Matthias is in charge of Spreadshirt’s entire system architecture and heads a team of developers and system administrators.
In addition Matthias invests, together with Team Europe Ventures, in online companies and is one of the Team Europe Ventures Fund investors.