Bayern Kapital et al. exit commercetools

REWE has purchased the former shareholders' entire stake in the company. The 40-strong team remains unchanged and commercetools co-founders, Dirk Hörig and Denis Warner, will continue as CEOs of the independent company.

The digital group stated it decided to invest because of commercetools' technologies, including its platform which works with all common programming languages and processes requests in less than 100 milliseconds.

REWE's capital will be invested in the further development of the company and expansion of third-party business.

Founded in 1927, REWE is a trade and tourism group which generated turnover of approximately €51bn in 2013, with €36bn from Germany alone. It operates 15,000 stores with 330,000 employees in 12 European countries; 10,000 stores and 226,000 employees are located in Germany.

Its brands include the REWE and Penny supermarkets and the Toom Baumarkt home improvement stores. It also operates tour operator ADAC Reisen and more than 2,100 travel agencies.

Previous funding
HTGF, BayBG, Astutia Ventures, Motion Capital and Bayern Kapital invested less than €10m in commercetools in November 2011. Family office Wecken & Cie also backed the company.

Company
Founded in 2006, commercetools has offices in Munich and Berlin. The company claims its sphere.io application programming interface (API) offers all essential commercial functions for multi-channel e-commerce, including flexibility, integration and cost-efficiency. commercetools' customers include Brita, Red Bull and Koffer 24.

People
Jean-Jacques van Oosten is chief digital officer at REWE Group. Alexander Ullmann represented BayBG in the original transaction. Thomas Manitta worked on the investment for Bayern Kapital.

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• Topics
• DACH
• Exits
• Technology
• Germany
• Trade sale
• High-Tech Gründerfonds
• Bayerische Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH (BayBG)