Dear colleagues and business partners,

As we approach the 2019 summer break, we would like to take this newsletter as an opportunity to keep you up to date with our latest activities. For us, the first half of 2019 was characterized by a new record deal flow, which shows that our investment approach has successfully established itself on the venture capital market. We are delighted to have had the opportunity to come into contact with great companies and impressive technologies. We are already looking forward to continuing the ongoing discussions. Based on our high-quality deal flow, we were able to conclude 2 further investments in the last 6 months.

new investments

In March of this year, we made our 7th investment in the Berlin-based company urban ENERGY. The company is developing an innovative IoT platform for smart cities and is thus tackling a major challenge posed by the energy transition: The increasing number of electric cars is leading to increased peak loads and overloaded power grids. We believe that the answer to these problems must be an innovative software solution that uses an artificial intelligence-based approach and connects energy producers with energy consumers.

Two months later, in May, we completed another investment in the Venlo-based start-up Accerion. The technology provider develops and supplies infrastructure-free positioning systems for mobile robots and autonomous vehicles and was founded in 2015. The AGVs are navigated using the ground as a reference, which enables efficient navigation and high accuracy without the need for expensive and inflexible infrastructure.

Latest developments

On the other hand, our portfolio companies continue to develop well and some of them are in the process of raising new funds to accelerate growth. We also expect to conclude several follow-up financing rounds for our portfolio companies during the second half of the year.

We have attended several interesting startup events in recent years. This year, we have also decided to actively sponsor some of these events in order to strengthen and promote the startup ecosystem in Germany. As Phoenix Contact Innovation Ventures, we will be sponsoring the High-Tech Venture Days in Dresden in October this year. The event will take place on 15. and 16 October and is Europe’s leading matchmaking and financing program for high-tech companies and international investors. The exclusive event is open to 40 start-ups and investors. We look forward to meeting you there!

Start-up Day 2020

We are also planning the third edition of our own internal event, the Phoenix Contact Start-up Day, which we will host in February 2020. As every year, we are particularly looking forward to meeting new and innovative companies who want to network with a hidden champion of the industry. If there are companies with an industrial innovation in your network, we would be delighted to receive your application. We will keep you informed about the organization and would be delighted to welcome you to our event!

Last but not least, we would like to draw your attention to the relaunch of our website www.phoenixcontact-innovationventures.com. We have implemented a new and fresh design to keep you up to date on our current activities and the development of our portfolio companies.

We wish you all a wonderful summer and look forward to staying in touch with you in the second half of 2019.

Best regards from Blomberg,

Your Phoenix Contact Innovation Ventures Team