Frank Thelen sells startup for “almost three -digit” million

Frank Thelen sold his startup to the US technology company APARY. According to the Handelsblatt information for an “almost three-digit” million amount.

Frank Thelen put an exit with his startup Scanbot SDK. He sold it to the American technology company APARYS. The exit amount is not known.

According to Handelsblatt, however, the sales amount should be in the “almost three -digit” million range. Scanbot customers include Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Bahn, Axa, P&G, Coop, Shiseido and PWC. The Scanbot team has around 100 employees.

“After almost 15 years, we have come the right time to hand over our company for further growth in apres,” Thelen writes about LinkedIn in his blog post. According to the Handelsblatt, aprys are for sale itself.

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How it started: Die Idee von Doo

The start -up trip with Scanbot SDK contains pretty much everything that a startup can go through. On LinkedIn, Thelen summarizes it as follows: “From IPO plans, to crash, pivot, re-pivot, for a global champion and exit on a US strategist.”

In 2011 Thelen started the startup under the name DOO with Marc Sieberger and Alex Koch. It should be the “paperless office”.

Documents should be available centrally, in a cloud. “That was ten startups in one,” Thelen writes about LinkedIn in his blog article. “But we were a well-coordinated team, were really in 60-hour weeks again and were able to inspire outstanding developers and designers through our network who worked with us day and night on this vision.”

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The startup grew very quickly. His seat was a villa in Bonn. Thelen and his co-founders in New York presented the beta version on Nasdaq-including announcement of a ten-million dollar financing round.

The pivot to scanbot

However, there were problems that led to the pivot: the technology was very good, but not 100 percent correct, acceptance among users was not sufficient, there was no further VC financing. Thelen and his team had to dismiss 80 percent of employees. The villa was also a passé.

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Then the pivot to scanbot. “We had to save the company. We decided to extract and develop a small feature of Doo. Mobile scanning. Scanbot was our scanner app, which is only a small part of the doo-T platform, but worked very well, ”writes Thelen.

The team scaled, Christoph Wagner became a new CEO in 2015, there was a villa comeback, CTO Koch set another focus on B2B, the scanbot app for B2C sold the founding team 2018-and now also the B2B part.