Which are really Berlin's best start ups?
To find out I used Mattermark, an awesome big data tool for private companies. Just like I did a few weeks ago, when looking at my home town of Cologne, I used Mattermark to see what we can learn if we combine our knowledge with data.
Mattermark is a big data tool that puts all kinds of indicators (web traffic, social media presence, mobile downloads, etc) together into their so called 'Mindshare Score' which helps to quickly identify companies whose online footprint is growing the fastest. It is measured on a weekly basis and averaged over time to provide a trending metric. Mattermark is used by lots of (U.S.) VCs, so it's definitely worth looking at.
After tackling Cologne, I now wanted to tackle the biggest boy in the German classroom: Berlin.
Here are the results:
Speaking of Mindshare Scores in the top 3: you might have noticed the almost shockingly low score of Zalando (365) compared to its peers and its own Growth Score (2309). Soundcloud (GS: 1546, MS: 1070) and Chartmogul (GS: 1255, MS:1255) almost equal up with their Growth Score and Mindshare Scores but Zalando really does not.
These are my thoughts on some of the companies down the list.
Pexels (MS: 1241) offers free high quality photo’s to use for commercial purposes without attribution. Actually, I've used Pexels to find a beautiful photo for this article's background. It has no employees and more than 1 million unique visitors per month. Impressive.
JUNIQE (MS: 1153) stays true to its Berlin roots and offers a platform to buy high-quality affordable art. Great team. I had the opportunity to invest at its seed round, came very close, and declined. Big mistake.
Dataconomy (MS: 1169): Dataconomy is a portal about data science, part of Hitfox. Surprisingly high on the list, but as a smart media company itself, they really master media themselves, Twitter in particular. This gives them an advantage in the way Mattermark measures.
Azubu (MS: 695): Azubu is a global eSports broadcast network. Received 34 million in funding last year, which is very impressive by Berlin standards. They’re up in monthly visitors and I’ll be keeping my eye on them, though I really don't get the eSports phenomenon (guess I'm too old for that...)
Blinkist (MS: 803): Blinkist is a mobile reading app, they craft and publish key lessons from non-fiction books into a format native to your mobile device. Very nice founders, we actually had them over at our Ecosia.org office for a session on 'Holacracy' just last week.
Medigo (MS: 703), an interesting company that helps you find the best healthcare worldwide. They received their last funding in December 2014 (6.2M) and are now steady on the rise in monthly visitors, although their growth score has been faltering a bit.
There are also some companies on the list which clearly don't belong there: Axel Springer is neither a start up nor a tech company, though they sometimes seem to pretend they are one...
So much for the top companies in the list.
The first company where I am invested in to come up on the charts is Aklamio. With a Growthscore of 224 and a Mindshare score of 165 they’re right up there with Wimdu and eWings.com. Unfortunately they didn't make the top 50, but luckily that means there's room to grow ;-)
If you look at the graphs, Aklamio has been holding a pretty stable weekly interval rate, swooping up and down on almost regular intervals. The Mindshare score has declined, of course, since its establishment but held on firmly ever since. There has been a decline in monthly unique visitor though since september of last year which hasn’t gotten up to where it should be. We’re looking forward to tackling that challenge.
So let's have a look back at Cologne and return to my initial promise of stacking cities up against each other. I briefly broadened my selection of companies to include both Berlin and Cologne to see where the companies would arrange itself this time.
I wasn't shocked to see that the list was mostly inhabited by Berliner companies, but here we go:
It takes a little while for a company from Cologne to show up but Foxydeal does so at the 17th place. NOTE: I started writing this article over the weekend and at that time, Foxydeal wasn’t nowhere near that far up on top. I wrote about Foxydeal in my article on Cologne and I stand by my point that they absolutely deserve their high rating. According to Mattermark they had a small decline in September 2014, but they have been nothing but growing ever since.
ArangoDB (MS: 650) also shows up at the 20th place. In it’s defense, there are about 8 companies up and 8 down which are ranked almost along the same numbers if you compare it to Chartmogul which has double the numbers.
Eyeo GmbH (makers of Adblock Plus), my company from Cologne, does a pretty good job, but still comes in at 35th on the list (a list that goes on for 5 pages). I am proud to say though that according to Mattermark Adblock is nothing but rising and might look that pretty soon we’ll score even higher!
I’ll return to writing about Berlin in the future since 2 of my companies are vested here. Also I'll go more into depth on just Berlin alone. But next article up in on Hamburg. I’m looking forward to diving in and share my thoughts on it.