CAPITAL FOR ENTREPRENEURS

Jochen remembers when Dirk Graber presented his business idea in the summer of 2008 at a trendy Asian restaurant in Berlin. “My expectations for selling glasses via the internet were low. But given that we were both HHL alumni (and the restaurant was supposed to be fantastic), I agreed to the meeting. Two hours later, I was electrified by Dirk’s ideas and game plan.”

After that, Grazia became Mister Spex’s lead investor. We introduced Dirk to Mirko Caspar, one of the top marketing people, and together they became one of the strongest e-commerce teams in Germany. In constant quest to further improve customer experience, Mister Spex opened several state-of-the-art retail stores throughout Germany.

In 2019, with target revenues of more than EUR 140mn, Mister Spex has become one of the leading opticians in Europe and is the undisputed number one in the online space. And the story continues…

Statista makes numbers meaningful and easily understandable. Grazia had been the sole investor from day one and enjoyed an attractive 22x multiple on its investment. And all thanks to a fantastic founder team that build the business with high capital efficiency. The exit story brought quite some excitement! Statista’s meteoric success since inception had resulted in a growing number of strategic acquisition inquiries.

In November 2015, at an Internet conference in London, the company had received an interesting purchase offer and was about to sign a letter of intent. During the conference three other strategic investors entered the race, with purchase price going up by the hour. Eventually we all agreed to accept the final offer of Stroer; gin & tonics seemed the perfect way to conclude the evening.

In 2019 Statista offers more than 1mn facts from over 22,500 sources covering 170 industries in 150 countries. Despite the bidding war, the strategic buyer made one of its best business decisions to acquire this pearl given the strong business model and solid management team. Statista continues to grow strongly and should reach revenues of more than EUR 100mn soon.

Serial entrepreneur Behrooz Rezvani and Stanford professor Andrea Goldsmith founded Quantenna in 2006. Their goal was to develop the world’s best Wi-Fi chipset that would widen the bandwidth and improve the performance of wireless transmission.

In 2007 Grazia joined Sequoia and Venrock and became instrumental in finding Quantenna’s first paying clients, triggering a series of additional referral projects. Quantenna developed into one of the fastest-growing semiconductor companies delivering to most of the largest communication companies worldwide. Today, Quantenna is a global leader and innovator of leading-edge performance Wi-Fi solutions that offer superior performance and establish benchmarks for speed, range, efficiency and reliability.

By 2019, Quantenna has shipped 200mn chips, has more than 40 global OEMs leveraging its technology and filed for over 95 patents. In October 2016 Quantenna celebrated its successful IPO at the NASDAQ starting the first day of trading at a market cap of about USD 600mn. Yet Grazia believed in more to come and thus fully maintained its existing share holdings. This decision was finally rewarded in March 2019, with ON Semiconductors announcing the acquisition of Quantenna for more than USD 1bn.

Alec was extremely enthusiastic when his school friend, Andreas Rüter, told him that his brother Hans-Martin was setting up a solar energy company. It meant both solving an urgent global need and doing so in an environmentally-friendly way. Grazia brought in Angiolo Laviziano as a new CFO and together assisted Hans-
Martin to build one of the best teams the solar energy sector had ever seen.

Conergy helped to spark the global transformation of the solar industry in 1998. Conergy began by developing small solar devices for domestic use. Later, the company went on to build the biggest and most sophisticated commercial solar power stations globally. The spectacular growth was assisted by the passage of the the German Renewable Energy Law, which came sooner than we have anticipated, and the resulting nationwide funding. Capitalizing on the first mover advantage in solar, Conergy also expanded into other geographies and renewables such as wind or biomass creating one of the fastest growing companies that Germany had ever seen.

In March 2005, Grazia took Conergy public with shares oversubscribed twenty-nine times. During the peak of the solar boom, Conergy’s market capitalization exceeded 2.2 billion euros – Grazia’s first “unicorn”.

Moviepilot is a fantastic example of just how dynamic a start-up can be. The right group of founders should never stop seizing new opportunities to reinvent their company. Tobias, Jon and Ben started in Berlin by introducing an algorithm to help fans rate and then identify their favourite movies. As the first European company to communicate via Facebook, Moviepilot developed into the biggest social publisher in the US entertainment industry.

The company brought the world of movies closer to more than 20 million fans while generating around 2.5 billion social impressions each month. As Facebook refused to share its advertising revenues with the content creators, Moviepilot was affected. Nevertheless the team managed to sell both the German and the US entities to the French media powerhouse Webedia for a middouble-digit million amount.

While the financial profit for all stakeholders was not exceptional, we are proud to have contributed to building this pioneer of social publishing.

What is the story of SiTime? It successfully disrupted the existing multi-billion dollar timing market with a micro-electro-mechanical system. When Markus Lutz and his team started the company by spinning off their development project from Bosch in 2005 they knew the journey would not be easy.

Developing a highly complex technology and then bringing it to market served by thousands of distributors indeed turned out to be a huge challenge. Even after the experienced and highly-skilled Rajesh Vashist took over as CEO in 2007 it took several years until SiTime had cracked the code of successfully selling their great products into the existing quartzbased timing market.

Today, SiTime is one of those amazing companies which make the world go round without us noticing it. Compared to quartz, SiTime‘s technology offers 30x better performance, 20x higher reliability and 40% less power consumption while also being much smaller and heat-resistant. SiTime products provide the heartbeat in electronics: they are in the smartphone in your pocket, the tablet on your desk, the camera on your helmet, the cockpit on your flight, and the earthquake detection system near your home.

You can‘t see them, but our world could not function without them. By 2019 the company has installed over 1 billion timing devices in 200 applications without a single field failure. The company has a 90% share of the MEMS timing market. The company’s path has initially been difficult but due to the team’s exceptionally hard work SiTime became a great success. In 2014 the company was sold to MegaChips for USD 200mn in cash. And the story continues: SiTime will make quartz obsolete.