Hasso Plattner Ventures‘ new no-equity seed fund has made its first investment by putting €100,000 into VersionEye, a B2D platform which helps developers keep their software libraries up to date. The Berlin-based startup offers SaaS for Web developers to more easily update dependencies and check licenses on open-source libraries – and no doubt provides a boost to the city’s techie community who are cynical of a perceived focus on lifestyle innovation. The latest funding will be used to develop an enterprise version of the product.
VersionEye monitors users’ repositories and notifies them about outdated dependencies in their projects. It currently supports a range of package managers including Ruby Gemfiles from Bundler and package.json files from NPM. Users can upload their project file to see the outdated dependencies or put in its URL for VersionEye to check it everyday.
It will also monitor private GitHub repositories and send periodical email notifications about outdated dependencies.
The company, which also has an office in San Francisco, was founded by developer and serial entrepreneur (PLOIN, WildGigs) Robert Reiz in the middle of 2012. He said: “I am very excited about the collaboration with HPV. … We will use the money to build an enterprise version of VersionEye. In that way we will make our service available for companies as well, and reach out into the B2B market.”
The basic version of VersionEye, with which you can monitor unlimited public repositories but no private ones, is free, while there are also premium plans ranging from $3 to $25 a month.
HPV’s new seed fund is being led by Lina Chong and is aimed at supporting entrepreneurs who are attempting to solve real problems or are taking an innovative approach to a stagnated market. Potential portfolio startups need a real asset element, like technology independent of a user base, and an innovative business case. Founders also need to be able to identify what major milestone they will achieve with the money – whether that be turning a back-of-a-napkin idea into a prototype or, like VersionEye, building an alpha enterprise version of a current product.
The seed fund is entirely separate from the main HPV fund and will offer tickets of either €50,000 or €100,000, which will come in the form of convertible notes – i.e. a bond which can be converted to shares later – rather than straight equity.