From pivot to exit: Frank Thelen sells his startup Scanbot SDK to a US company
Frank Thelen has sold his startup to the American technology company Apryse. According to Handelsblatt, the company reportedly sold his startup for a sum in the "almost three-digit million range."
Frank Thelen has exited his startup Scanbot SDK . He sold it to the American technology company Apryse. The exit price is undisclosed.
According to Handelsblatt, however, the sales price is said to be in the "almost three-digit" million range. Scanbot's customers include Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Bahn, AXA, P&G, Coop, Shiseido, and PwC. The Scanbot team has around 100 employees.
"After almost 15 years, the time is now right for us to hand over our company to Apryse for further growth," Thelen writes in his blog post on LinkedIn . According to Handelsblatt , Apryse itself is up for sale.
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The founder's journey with Scanbot SDK encompasses pretty much everything a startup can go through. On LinkedIn, Thelen summarizes it as follows: "From IPO plans, to crash, pivot, re-pivot, to global champion, and exit to a US strategist."
In 2011, Thelen launched the startup Doo with Marc Sieberger and Alex Koch. It was intended to be the "paperless office."
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Documents were to be centrally accessible, in a cloud. "It was like ten startups in one," Thelen writes in his blog post on LinkedIn. "But we were a well-coordinated team, really keen on working 60-hour weeks again, and through our network, we were able to inspire outstanding developers and designers who worked with us day and night on this vision."
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The startup grew rapidly. Its headquarters were in a villa in Bonn. Thelen and his co-founders presented the beta version in New York at the NASDAQ – including the announcement of a ten million dollar financing round.
However, there were problems that led to the pivot: The technology, while very good, was not 100 percent accurate, user acceptance was insufficient, and there was no further venture capital funding. Thelen and his team had to lay off 80 percent of their employees. The villa was also a thing of the past.
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Then the pivot to Scanbot. "We had to save the company. We decided to extract a small feature from doo and develop it further: mobile scanning. Scanbot was our scanner app, which, although only a small part of the doo platform, worked very well," writes Thelen.
The team scaled, Christoph Wagner became the new CEO in 2015 , there was a Villa comeback, CTO Koch placed a further focus on B2B, the founding team sold the Scanbot app for B2C in 2018 – and now also the B2B part.
businessinsider
