eZ Systems takes over High-Tech Gruenderfonds
01/11/2011
Successful exit for German IT technology and now one of the services offered by eZ Systems.
With the acquisition of the German high-technology start-up, YOOCHOOSE, the Norwegian company eZ Systems AS is expanding its content management system, eZ Publish Enterprise, with one of the world’s leading recommendation engines. YOOCHOOSE was founded in 2009 by Dr. Uwe Alkemper and Michael Friedmann, and convinced High-Tech Gruenderfonds to provide seed financing at an early stage. Behind YOOCHOOSE – a spin-off company from Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin – lies a high-performance, patented recommendation system, which enables companies to significantly increase their revenues on the Internet using personalized recommendations.
Partnerships with established providers of online shop services and web analytics provide the YOOCHOOSE Recommender Engine with access to a wide client spectrum from the fields of e-commerce, media and publishing. The investments by High-Tech Gruenderfonds have enabled the recommendation system to be developed further, and it is now available for use by all eZ clients as the eZ Recommender Engine. “The close links with eZ Publish represent a crucial step for YOOCHOOSE as a technology start-up. We can now make our products available to the wide, international market of eZ Systems clients and considerably increase our reach. We look forward to working with an innovative company such as eZ Systems”, says Dr. Uwe Alkemper, founder and CEO of YOOCHOOSE.
YOOCHOOSE clients already include Deutsche Telekom AG, which generally relies on YOOCHOOSE for online recommendations. Musicload and Gamesload have successfully used the solution since 2010. “Personalization and recommendations are the key trends on the market which are currently in demand. With our strategic investment in YOOCHOOSE, we are expanding our range of products with a superior piece of technology and strengthening our innovation leadership in web content management”, explains Gabriele Viebach, CEO of eZ Systems. In contrast to standard solutions, the Recommender Engine from YOOCHOOSE generates recommendations for a wide variety of content (news, films, music, software, etc.) and can be flexibly integrated into the customer’s existing shop, web analytics or content management system.
About High-Tech Gründerfonds
High-Tech Gründerfonds invests risk capital in young, high-potential technology companies that convert promising research results in business success. The seed finance provided aims to enable start-ups to take their R&D project through to the creation of a prototype, a proof of concept or to market launch. The Fund normally invests EUR 500,000; in total, up to two million euros are available per technology company. Investors in this public/private partnership are the German Federal Ministry for Business and Technology, the KfW Banking Group as well as the twelve industrial groups of ALTANA, BASF, B.Braun, Robert Bosch, CEWE Color, Daimler, Deutsche Post DHL, Deutsche Telekom, Qiagen, RWE Innogy, Tengelmann and Carl Zeiss. High-Tech Gründerfonds has a fund volume of about 560,5 million euros in two funds (272 million euros fund I, 288,5 million Euros fund II).
