The first two months of 2014 have been a busy one for early-stage startup investments in Berlin, but the funding activity in Germany has not been limited to the capital. Elastic.io, an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaas) company based in Bonn, has this week closed a “significant” seed round involving a group of private investors from Kuwait and Germany.
Elastic.io offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers a “fast, seamless and transparent integration method to connect SaaS applications.” Specifically, the startup targets cloud-based app creators using an SaaS business model with its simplified integration and easy-to-use developer toolkit, as well as an “integration store with different standardized connectors for embedding into SaaS applications which can be used from SaaS vendors on a ‘pay per use’ billing model.”
The money has come form a joint venture investment corporation set up by the Alghanim family in Kuwait and the Kuenheim family from Germany. It will be used to speed up product development and to expand the sales and marketing team with a view to faster international growth.
Renat Zubairov, CEO and co-founder of elastic.io, said: “We are happy to see not only sufficient financial resources to push our company forward but also a day-to-day support from our investors with [a] strong entrepreneurial background.”
Fabian von Kuenheim said: “We were compelled by the leading technology of elastic.io allowing a straightforward and seamless integration of heterogeneous SaaS-based application vendors.”
Elastic.io was founded in 2012 in Bonn, a city near Cologne which was formerly the capital of West Germany and which is still home to the HQ of Deutsche Telekom, by Zubairov together with Rico zu Knyphausen and Igor Drobiazko. It claims over 2,500 developers worldwide as customers.