Dear DN Friends and Investors,<\/p>\n
you might have seen the big news already here<\/a>, here<\/a> or here<\/a>: DN Capital’s portfolio company Auto1 listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange which represented the largest public market debut for a tech company in Germany to date. The company\u2019s shares which were priced at \u20ac38 at the initial public offering, opened 45% higher and eventually closed at \u20ac53. With a valuation of over \u20ac11 billion Auto1 became officially a decacorn.<\/p>\n DN Capital is proud\u00a0to have led the Series A in 2013 and since then to have been able to work closely with the company on this \u00a0exciting journey.<\/p>\n When DN first interacted with\u00a0Auto1 (then called WKDA or WirKaufenDeinAuto), the\u00a0business\u00a0was\u00a09 months\u00a0old, had\u00a0opened its first three locations\u00a0only\u00a0and\u00a0was buying and selling under 200 cars a month (compared with 615,000 cars annually 6 years later).<\/p>\n A\u00a0key factor\u00a0in\u00a0Auto1\u2019s success was its rapid execution capability.\u00a0Christian Bertermann<\/a> and Hakan\u00a0Koc<\/a> were the perfect match to take on this challenge. In their previous roles at Home24 and Groupon, where they were trained by Europe\u2019s finest Oliver Samwer<\/a> himself, \u00a0the duo already proved their ability to roll out high growth ventures launching in many new cities and geographies in short periods of time. We\u00a0could\u00a0also\u00a0envision the quality of organization Christian and Hakan\u00a0set out to build\u00a0through meeting the employees, executives and advisors\u00a0they convinced,\u00a0to join the company early, such as\u00a0Ronny Lange<\/a>, who DN\u00a0Capital\u00a0later backed successfully as co-Founder of Quandoo<\/a> together with Philipp Magin<\/a>.<\/p>\n Auto1\u2019s success story needs to be put into perspective of the overall market. The used car market in Europe is not only huge (\u20ac600\u00a0billion a year for the B2B and B2C segments), it is\u00a0also\u00a0fragmented, regional, unsophisticated, opaque and composed of many intermediaries taking small commissions along the value chain.\u00a0In other words, it was the perfect breeding ground for a data-driven ambitious challenger.\u00a0Auto1 was the first\u00a0company\u00a0to provide transparency, sophistication, disintermediation, trustworthiness (on both the customer and dealer side) and convenience through leveraging technology.\u00a0We\u00a0were\u00a0immediately hooked by the strong networks effects scale and technology could bring in this model.<\/p>\n Since leading the Series A round, we have had the privilege to support Auto1 on its incredible journey to dominate the used car industry as the company scaled all over Europe in record speed, raised funds from some of the most renowned investors in the industry, and achieved one of the largest public events in Europe\u2019s venture history! We at DN Capital are incredibly proud and honored that we had the chance to be a small part of this journey and give our wholehearted congratulations to all team members, advisors and co-investors.<\/p>\n Going forward, we are thrilled to continue supporting the Auto1 team with their ambitious plans, and we look forward to seeing the company exceed all expectations and transform the \u20ac1.4 trillion used car market globally.<\/p>\n This liquidity event demonstrates the ambition and success of the European start-up ecosystem that DN has been involved in since its start. We look forward to working with future entrepreneurs that want to create global category leaders and if you are starting such a company do not hesitate to reach out to us.<\/p>\n The DN team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear DN Friends and Investors, you might have seen the big news already here, here or here: DN Capital’s portfolio company Auto1 listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange which represented the largest public market debut for a tech company in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-portfolio-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":652,"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651\/revisions\/652"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dncapital.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}