High-Tech Gründerfonds invests in Fraunhofer Spin-Off wetransform
We're happy to announce that we've completed a funding round with the High-Tech Gründerfonds. This will enable us to grow both our technical team and to grow our customer base during a critical time frame in the INSPIRE implementation. Find our joint Press release on the opportunity below:
The High-Tech Gründerfonds invests in wetransform, a start-up that builds a cloud solution for particularly easy data transformation and migration.
(Darmstadt) Tasks such as environmental protection and disaster recovery require cross-border collaboration. Often, necessary collaboration suffers due to missing, interoperable data. wetransform helps organisations that need to work together to make data interoperable, with just a fraction of the effort and cost required previously. Thorsten Reitz, founder of wetransform, explains: „With our cloud platform, you can create and use interoperable data from existing databases or previously implemented interfaces in minutes". The solutions developed by wetransform enable the fast transformation of large, complex data collections, with low effort for configuration and dedicated risk management.
The company, founded in 2014, is a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD, an organisation with 30 years of applied research experience. At Fraunhofer, the founding team contributed in a leading role to numerous EU research projects to build the „Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community“ (INSPIRE). Throughout Europe, more than 13.600 organisations will implement this spatial data infrastructure and will invest up to 170 million Euro per year. This projects needs to be completed until 2020. After the initial set-up, the infrastructure is expected to show its value for economy and administrations. A cornerstone of the infrastructure is that all public spatial data will be made accessible continuously in the most recent version.
The ambitions of wetransform go far beyond one infrastructure project, though: The team, consisting of experienced software engineers and innovation managers, is already working to make their technology usable for other project and markets as well. They are combining their transformation tools with a new generation of data modelling tools. The market volume for such applications in Europe and North America is at least 500 Million Euros per year. wetransform GmbH has already convinced many customers and partners through their products and high service quality. Their customers include organisations such as “GDI Südhessen”, the „European Environmental Agency“, and the Swiss „Bundesamt für Landestopografie swisstopo“.
In addition to their advanced technology, the founding team‘s entrepreneurial spirit was one of the key reasons for the High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) to invest in wetransform. „The market for spatial data systems (GIS) is growing in the double digits every year, and the increasing need for effective data transformation and publishing tools form great development potentials for wetransform“, says Dr. Marc Umber, Investment Manager at the HTGF. „As Germany’s largest and most active early stage venture capital investor, the investment was a logical step for us. “