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Date: October 26, 2009. YOOCHOOSE GmbH located in Cologne (Germany), a spin-off from Deutsche Telekom Laboratories receives seed-financing capital from High-Tech Gründerfonds and the Connected Life and Work Fund which is managed by T-Venture. The company offers its customers a high-performance recommender that enables them to significantly increase their revenues from personalized recommendations. YOOCHOOSE participates through its transaction-based licensing model from the financial added value that it creates for the customers.
In contrast to traditional solutions, YOOCHOOSE recommendations can be overarching in terms of content (e.g. videos, music, software, and games) and independent of existing shop, data mining or content management systems that have already been implemented by the customer.
With its recommender system, YOOCHOOSE utilizes a unique approach, which has been the result of a research project of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin (Germany) and Israel. The technology with a pending patent application will be used exclusively by YOOCHOOSE.
"It increasingly becomes a critical success factor for eCommerce companies to offer to its customers the right value at the right time. With a recommender system as advanced as the YOOCHOOSE engine, you know your customer and create a unique selling point,“ said Oliver Fietz, Fund Manager T-Venture. "Besides the team, we are convinced by the B2B business model. This made our investment decision easy.“
The company was founded in February 2009 by Dr. Alkemper as CEO and M. Friedmann as CTO. Within this short period, YOOCHOOSE has already attracted its first pilot customers. The seed financing by High-Tech Gründerfonds and T-Venture will allow the company to offer the state-of-the-art recommendation system to a broad spectrum of e-commerce, media and publishing companies.
"Personalized recommendations are currently among the hottest topics requested by customers. With YOOCHOOSE, we invest not only in a superior technology but also in a highly professional team in this market," said Holger Heinen, senior investment manager of High-Tech Gründerfonds.
YOOCHOOSE GmbH was founded in February 2009 by Dr. Uwe Alkemper and Michael Friedmann. The company offers software for personalized recommendations. The new recommendation algorithms result from research activities of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories. The investors are High-Tech Gründerfonds and T-Venture. YOOCHOOSE GmbH owns a subsidiary, YOOCHOOSE Labs Ltd. in Israel, for research and development. YOOCHOOSE currently has 10 employees. For more information, please visit www.yoochoose.com.
Connected Life and Work Fund Fund is managed by T-Venture, the venture capital company of Deutsche Telekom. Its purpose is to support the department Products & Innovations of Deutsche Telekom in implementing its goals. The focal points for investment are companies in the areas of Internet and media. For more information, please visit: www.t-venture.de.
The High-Tech Gründerfonds invests venture capital in young, up-and-coming technology companies, which implement promising research results in the industry. The start-up companies are to lead their R&D projects to the production of a prototype or a “proof of concept” or market launch by means of the seed financing of up to EUR 500,000. The High-Tech Gründerfonds has a fund volume of around EUR 272 million. Investors of the public-private partnership are the German Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology, the KfW bank group as well as the six industrial groups BASF, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Robert Bosch, Daimler and Carl Zeiss.
Links:
www.t-venture.de/press-release
www.high-tech-gruenderfonds.de/press-release