Martin Saidler, serial entrepreneur and investor, is back to Switzerland for around 2 years and is one of the rare investor in the region who will only invest in internet startups (or at least, who is publicly claiming it). Mr. Saidler was successful in Berlin and then in Eastern Europe, where he had up to 150 (!) participations at the same time.
He also was one of the first investor in b-to-v, famous family office and seed fund in German speaking Switzerland. Now, Saidler is focusing his efforts on building an incubator called Centralway, which is actually a web agency with 38 employees, where new venture can be boosted.
He build 4 pillars to provide a real booster to startups:
- Centralway Factory: using Centralway’s available resources in marketing and software development. Key assumption is to motivate own employees to launch a new venture.
- Centralway Cloud: providing hosting services
- Centralway Academy: educating employees
- Centralway Seed: financing in the early days, with an entry ticket of CHF 20’-50’000.- (when the founder just has a business idea). Saidler also imagines he could buy the venture to develop it on its own. He is also ready to invest in more mature startup, but only by opportunity.
Investing areas for Centralway are finance/banking and e-commerce industry. By now, current investments are Sandbox Network, HR Matching, c-crowd and merge.rs. With these strategic investments, Centralway can add skills to its incubated startups (from networking to talent search to financing to exit).
I never met Mr. Saidler personally but I think this kind of value proposition (with the one of DeinDeal.ch) is really helping Swiss startup scene to reach the next level. Probably, if you’ve already created your company and have some strong assets, you’re not the one they are targetting. But if you have a cool idea and you’re just starting… take your chance! The worst that could happen is that they don’t accept you in their incubation program (they probably won’t sign you an NDA, but they can’t screw you: reputation is THE key of such incubation programs).
Information from this post were originally published on startwerk, the swiss german speaking startup blog from Zürich.