Bertelsmann Investments

Happy New Year everyone - this Monday we kicked off 2025. We had a fantastic 2024 with strong outcomes and milestones. I'm particularly grateful and proud of my great team at Bertelsmann Investments, our venture investing teams and Bertelsmann Next growth businesses including Deniz Pielsticker, Kerstin Samberger, Annabelle Long, Pankaj Makkar, Urs Cete, Thorsten Wirkes, Peter Koop, Gero Hesse, Jonas Thiemann and Carlo Szelinsky and all your teams! Not forgetting our partners and unique founders, with whom we have the privilege of working every day to realize their business ideas and visions. 2024 truly was a pivotal year with significant organic growth and us delivering on our ambition of empowering entrepreneurs around the world. We will announce the final figures for the 2024 financial year in March. A personal highlight for me last year was the Bertelsmann Leading Entrepreneurship Conference in Amsterdam with hours dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs and learning from all the great entrepreneurial success stories at Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA.   After the break we're back at it with new goals, fresh ideas and the next opportunity to achieve great things together with outstanding people. I am looking forward to everything that lies ahead. #EmpoweringEntrepreneurs #BertelsmannInvestments #VentureCapital #BertelsmannNext #Recap #NewYear

🚀Bertelsmann Investments expands EMBRACE with the acquisition of VOCANTO!🚀 Congrats to Gero Hesse, Christian Hansmann, Felix von Zittwitz and the entire EMBRACE team! Today, we announced another strategic move to strengthen Bertelsmann Investments' HR tech platform EMBRACE: The acquisition of VOCANTO GmbH, an e-learning platform in the apprentice segment in Germany. I am very happy to welcome the founders and Co-CEOs Stephan Hansen und Johannes Schulte and the whole team. You have built a meaningful digital learning product supporting over 2,000 companies and a multitude of apprentices. Together, we will continue the success story of Vocanto.   With the recent acquisitions including milch & zucker GmbH and Studyflix in the past 1.5 years alongside multiple organic initiatives, EMBRACE is rapidly evolving into a comprehensive HR-tech provider.  The transaction is another strategic milestone for Bertelsmann Investments in expanding our growth program Bertelsmann Next. It is also an additional compelling example how we empower entrepreneurs. Looking forward to continuing this journey!   Deniz Pielsticker   #HRtech #EMBRACE #Vocanto #BertelsmannNext #BertelsmannInvestments #EmpoweringEntrepreneurs https://lnkd.in/efX3MSCD,

Bertelsmann achieved revenues of €13.4 billion after nine months of 2024, with 3.1% organic growth. Investments of €1.5 billion were made into the Boost strategy. Despite the sale of Majorel in 2023, key businesses including Penguin Random House, BMG, Arvato, and Bertelsmann Education Group drove strong performance. CEO Thomas Rabe stated, "Our positioning across a broad range of businesses is increasingly paying off." Highlights include growth in streaming at RTL, bestselling titles at Penguin Random House, and dynamic developments at Arvato. Bertelsmann Investments also made 43 new and follow-on investments. For the full year 2024, Bertelsmann expects overall positive business performance with improved earnings.

BDMI congratulates portfolio company TollBit on their $24 million Series A funding! https://lnkd.in/gymrmXSw

Alongside creativity, entrepreneurship is an essential that underlies everything we do at Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA. Reason enough to dedicate an entire conference to this essential. The Leading Entrepreneurship Conference took place last week in Amsterdam with 300 participants from all around the world. It was a great, inspiring event during which I also had the pleasure of welcoming Bertelsmann entrepreneurs and founders from our portfolio on stage. Many thanks to Jon Loba from BMG - The New Music Company, Peter Koop from Bertelsmann Investments, Bin Chen from Stori and Adwait Vikram Singh from Rozana.in. Each of your entrepreneurial stories is so unique and remarkable. I am very happy that we can support you in realizing your entrepreneurial vision. You have shown on stage why Bertelsmann is the best home for entrepreneurs – THANK YOU. Also a big shoutout to my entire team from Bertelsmann Investments. It was an intense but also fun time with you all! #entrepreneurship #Bertelsmannessentials #empoweringentrepreneurs #bertelsmanninvestments

The success story of Doccla, Europe's leading provider of virtual hospital platforms for telemonitoring, continues and I am very excited that Bertelsmann Investments is continuing to invest alongside General Catalyst Chris Bischoff and Speedinvest. We also welcome our new co-investors Lakestar, Optum Ventures and Elaia. Doccla's technology enables effective and uncomplicated remote medical monitoring of patients in their home environment, carried out by medical professionals. The team around the founders Dag Larsson and Martin Ratz now cares for around 10,000 patients in several countries every day. Chapeau and keep up the pace! #doccla #remotepatientmonitoring #venturecapital #bertelsmanninvestments #empoweringentrepreneurs

H1 2024: it's a wrap. Today we published our results at Bertelsmann Investments. Here are the highlights: Bertelsmann Next - Our growth equity program Bertelsmann Next delivers +100% organic growth vs PY. Next verticals include digital health, pharma tech (ROTE LISTE®), HR tech (EMBRACE) and mobile adtech (applike group) - The pharma tech platform completed the bold-on acquisition of EXTEDO, a leader in the regulatory affairs software market Venture Funds - We completed 30 new and follow-on investments w/ our investment teams of BAI Capital, Bertelsmann India Investments, BDMI and BCI - Investment highlights include Stori, LetsTransport, HF0, Mistral AI, Guardoc Health - Total investment amount over our lifecycle is €1.9bn w/ €1.4bn DPI and 374 active portfolio companies Our strong current trading is a testament to our growth strategy paying off. We continue to be driven by our ambition to empower entrepreneurs all around the world. Thank you to my great team at BI, our founders and partners. The year is off to a great start w/ many more things to come. Stay tuned. #bertelsmanninvestments #empoweringentrepreneurs #interimresults #bertelsmann #venturecapital https://lnkd.in/duXURQRC

Congratulations to the entire Stori team for their continued growth and for completing one of the largest raises of the year in LatAm, securing over $200M in new funding. We are extremely excited about our continued support of Stori, a company we have partnered with and invested in since the Series A in 2019. Co-founder Bin Chen and the entire Stori team have demonstrated remarkable execution in a competitive market, democratizing access to financial services for Latin America's underbanked. Also massive congratulations to Annabelle Long and her team at BAI Capital for spearheading this investment in Mexico - another clear testament to Annabelle's recognition in this year's Forbes 2024 global Midas List. Very well deserved! #stori #BAI #mexico #financialinclusion #fintech #unicorn

The companies of the Bertelsmann Content Alliance are launching a joint initiative today, July 29, 2024, under the claim “My Reason for Confidence”. 💪 The aim of the initiative is to promote social cohesion. Bertelsmann's creative companies - RTL Deutschland, RTL Radio Deutschland, UFA, the Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH publishing group, the music company BMG - The New Music Company and We Are Era - are implementing the initiative with a wide range of content on their platforms and channels: On air and on social media, in digital offerings, on the radio, in podcasts and with various events. The initiative is accompanied by a broad-based marketing campaign that focuses on people from the heart of society as well as prominent faces. They are united by an optimistic view of topics such as #democracy, #diversity, #justice, #antiracism and #goodcoexistence. 🤝 Stephan Schmitter Chairman of the Bertelsmann Content Alliance and CEO RTL Germany: „(...) With our content and the accompanying campaign, we want to give a stage to topics and people that are infectious with optimism and encourage a positive outlook on the future (…).” For further information, you can also visit our landing page: https://lnkd.in/esKRzZjv

adjoe Ranked Among Top App Monetization Platforms 2024! Exciting news – adjoe has been recognized by Business of Apps as a top player in app monetization. adjoe allows you to gamify your in-app-loyalty program: We've designed the product adjoe Playtime to scale your app’s transactions and revenue across verticals – fintech, QSR, shopping - and build loyalty through repeated engagement . And we do it by leveraging the continuously growing consumer interest in mobile games. Here’s some reasons why we are a top choice for app monetization: 💡 With adjoe, app businesses increase their revenue by up to 100% without cannibalizing their other revenue streams. 💡  Users engage with our partners’ brands daily by earning rewards, even if they’re still not ready to make a purchase. Yet, this habit of coming back to the app inevitably increases their purchase rates. 💡 We tailor each arcade to align with the goals of the publisher’s app and build a premium UX that feels native to it, delivering the best engagement metrics and eCPMs around. It's great to see that our products withstand any changes in the industry and come out on top. Although, with the team that we have built, it doesn't surprise me. Speaking of, shoutout to our incredible team at adjoe – your hard work and eagerness to innovate made this possible. And a huge thanks to our partners, like Fetch, WeWard, DeutschlandCard GmbH | Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA and many other leaders in their segments, for creating amazing app experiences and making our solutions part of them.