Nitrado acquires APEX and MCProHosting
We announced the first add-on of the year with MCProHosting for Nitrado. Nitrado has thus managed to unite the three largest game hosting companies under one roof. A success story that shows how a German medium-sized company managed to assert itself in its segment while building a strong global brand.
The sellers of Apex Hosting and MCProHosting named Nitrado itself as one of the main reasons for the sale. Nitrado as a brand stands for an excellent gaming experience, great customer support and a very strong technological basis.
The FLEX Personal Branding Week
The topic of brands also accompanied us at another point this month.
We decided last year to focus on building our personal brands because we see great added value for us with this topic.
Since we are always learning and want to learn from the best, we have spoken to several pioneers in this segment over the past few weeks. We asked them how they built their personal brand, how they use it, where they benefitted from it and what their biggest learnings were.
We also want to sensitize the CEOs and employees of our portfolio companies to personal branding and would like to share this knowledge with the entire community. That is why we decided to make a content series out of it, the FLEX Personal Branding Week.
We spoke to Philipp Westermeyer from the OMR about this. He shared his personal story with us and revealed how to get invited as a podcast guest.
We also talked to Kati Ernst. With ooia, she created a D2C brand from scratch, and achieved sales of well over 10 million euros in just 3 years. Kati has managed to build ooia into a brand with 85k followers, especially via Instagram. She shared some tips and tricks on how to become successful on social media.
In addition, we contacted and spoke to Oliver Kohl. He is in charge of the largest German LinkedIn accounts, such as the account of SNOCK’S founder Johannes Kliesch. In the interview, he reveals what is necessary on a weekly basis to build your brand on LinkedIn.
Most recently, we spoke to Felix Haas, who built Bits & Pretzels, the leading event for entrepreneurs. He told us how to get speaker slots on conferences and use the stage for yourself.
The complete interviews will be published during our Personal Branding Week in March – stay tuned!
FLEX continues to grow
Our growth within the Flex team rounds off the highlights of the month. We were able to recruit four new employees. Jan strengthens the People Team. Mona supports operations. We persuaded our interns Gary and Maarten to join the FLEX team as analysts. We at FLEX are delighted about the personnel additions.
Focus 2022 – Further development of the platforms, new fund, scaling
At FLEX, like many other funds, we had a very eventful last year. Accordingly, we did not have much time to think about the year 2022 in the fourth quarter of 2021 and consequently set the planning at the beginning of the new year.
For this year we have several priorities:
The focus is certainly on the further development of our platforms in the area of game hosting (Nitrado, APEX & McProHosting), output management software (NIC & Formware) and software for healthcare providers (Amparex & IPRO).
Last year we sold a majority stake in Egoditor, which has resulted in us finding ourselves in a new role as a minority investor. We are primarily concentrating on continuing to support the founders as a sparring partner and being a good partner for Spectrum. At the same time, we also step out of the way where we are no longer needed in order to let Spectrum act freely.
We will continue to invest. We are aiming at setting up two new platform investments and to strengthen these platforms again with add-ons, always with the aim of developing these groups of companies into market leaders in their segment.
In addition, we will raise a new, larger fund this year, which will give us significantly more opportunities to support top entrepreneurs in building market-leading software platforms.
Since FLEX was founded in 2019, we have learned a lot and have already invested most of the current fund successfully. The next challenge is scaling our model.
For us, this means to significantly expand our team and hire more employees, but also taking the next professionalization steps. Mainly in relation to our operating model, because we still see great potential for optimization here.
Finally, the market often tells us that we do things differently from other traditional funds, but only communicate this very selectively. For this year we have decided to make our USPs even more visible and to communicate our vision of the “Next Generation Private Equity Fund” more openly.
We wish you a successful month.
Kind regards
Peter Waleczek and Christoph Jost
