A nice article about two experienced founders, who I met first time in 2012, just when they started to kick of riskmethods. Indeed, like mentioned in the article, “klassische Start-upler sind Schwarz, 41 Jahre, und Zimmer, 46 Jahre, laengst nicht mehr“, but that made the whole story particulaly interesting to me as a mentor and business angel, used to take risk on all fronts but not on lack of domain market know-how!
It took Rolf and Heiko less than 5 minutes to convince me about this huge market opportunity and the insufficiencies of current solutions. Right thereafter they picked out a tablet and showed me some intriguing mock-ups, which put some meat to the bone before they even had a development team. Both senior executives have been in this domain (SCRM, Supply Chain Risk Management) for quite some time and both are well acknowledged experts in this field, with complimentary skills and experiences from Sales to R&D.
It did not take long to excite some early investors including a local Government Fund. It is usually not that trivial to raise external, institutional money without meeting the “classic” SaaS KPI requirements of at least some MRR (5 – 15k), from, at least, some customers (10 – 15 ) and so on. The two founders, because they knew already most of their potential customers for a long time, could present true market validation and personal references from numerous sizeable European enterprises. Most of them are happy customers by now.
So what? Just my thoughts about riskmethods and the company’s development so far, having successfully gone from F&F to Seed via Pre-A to Ser-A all the way to Ser-B, and soon looking for Ser-C. (also see my publication Financing A SaaS Company ).
Alexander
May 15 2018
GRUENDERSERIE
Die Welt-Checker
von Rüdiger Köhn, Mai 15, 2018 – 9:04
Rolf Zimmer and Heiko Schwarz from riskmethods
Im globalen Produktionsnetzwerk genügt eine kleine Störung – und schon steht die Werkbank still. Damit es selten dazu kommt, haben Heiko Schwarz und Rolf Zimmer ein Frühwarnsystem entwickelt.
Check out the entire article at the link above
Quelle: FAZ