Dear colleagues and business partners,

as we are getting closer to the 2019 summer break, we would like to take this newsletter as an opportunity to keep you up to date about our latest activities. For us, the first half of 2019 was marked by a new dealflow record, which shows us that our investment approach has successfully established itself in the venture capital market. We are glad that we’ve had the chance to get in contact with great companies and impressive technologies. We are already looking forward to continuing the ongoing discussions. Derived from our high-quality dealflow, we have been able to close 2 more investments in the last 6 months.

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

Two months later in May we completed a further investment into the Venlo based startup Accerion. The technology provider develops and provides infrastructure-free positioning systems for mobile robots and autonomous vehicles and was founded in 2015. The navigation for the AGVs is done by using the floor as a reference, enabling efficient navigation and achieving high accuracy without requiring expensive and inflexible infrastructure in the field.

On the other side, our portfolio companies continue developing well and some of them are in the process of raising new funds to accelerate growth. Furthermore, we expect to close several follow-on financing rounds from our portfolio companies in the course of the second half year

Over the last couple of years, we have visited several interesting startup events. In addition to this, we decided this year to actively sponsor some of these events to strengthen and promote the startup ecosystem in Germany. Doing so, in October this year we as PHOENIX CONTACT Innovation Ventures will sponsor the High-Tech Venture Days in Dresden. The event is taking place on October the 15^th & 16^th and is Europe’s leading match making and funding program for high-tech companies and international investors. The exclusive event is open for 40 start-ups and investors. We are happy meeting you there!

In addition to this, we are planning the third version of our own internal event, the PHOENIX CONTACT Start-up-Day, which will be hosted by us in February 2020. Like every year, we are especially looking forward to getting to know new and innovative ventures who would like to get networked with an industry hidden champion. If there are companies in your network with an industrial innovation, we are looking forward to their application. We will keep you posted on the organization and we would be very glad to welcome you on our event!

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

We wish you all an enjoyable summer time and we are looking forward to staying in touch with you in the second half of 2019.

Best regards from Blomberg,

Your PHOENIX CONTACT Innovation Ventures Team

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