Best Practice cross-border cooperation: How we helped Cammio to grow internationally

Rene Reijtenbagh – CEO of Business Angels Connect

“Go for funding where your growth is” with this strategy, Business Angels Connect – a BeNeLux private investors network – connects growth companies also with German business angels. After all, local angels not only provide growth capital, but have contacts and expertise to be successful on the German market.

Internationalization in the Business Angels market: three trends

As CEO of Business Angels Connect, I am convinced that internationalization in the business angels market will grow: There are three main trends taking place:

1. First, we notice a new generation of young business angels with an international lifestyle. For them distance and cultural differences doesn’t play a big role. It is about investing and cooperation with the best team with disruptive innovations in reach with real solutions for huge societal problems.
2. Secondly those disruptive innovations are understood by just a selective group of investors who can judge the technical Due Dilligence and the local market strategy. Therefore, when you have in reach more investors (internationally) you have more change in finding them for investing in your business.
3. Third: cross border cooperations broadens the network for new clients and additional exit potential. The visuality in the market increases and the international oriented investors bring in their contacts.

These are the three reasons why Business Angels Connect works together cross border with Angel Networks (BAE Club, European Health Investors Network, Angelfunding Germany, Business Angels Agentur Ruhr , Angel Engine  across Europe in different European projects).

Cross border investing: the Cammio case

Business Angels Connect introduced Walter Hueber, CEO of Cammio, to the Business Angels Agentur Ruhr (BAAR), a North Rhine-Westphalian angels network, located in Essen, where he was invited to pitch.

The business idea behind Cammio is an online video recruitment platform. They do this with video interviews that generate a personality profile and then ‘learn to match’ using an algorithm. With this Cammio ‘upgrades ‘ the recruitment process of employers to a process in which the personality of the candidate is central. Specifically, that means being able to recruit faster, better and people who stay longer and are more productive because of their personal match with job, team and culture.

Cammio was originally developed in a subsidiary of the Telegraaf Media Group and then the founders did a management buy-out. They wanted to build an international company right away, with the Netherlands as base and directly into Europe.

The Cammio pitch by the German BAAR angels led to the investment by two German business angels late last year. Walter Hueber: “Since the beginning of this year, our company Cammio has a branch in Cologne with a German team. We organized the funding with German business angels in order to scale up quickly and tap into a new network. With DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) as our second home market, we now have a tremendously strong position in Europe. The majority of our sales now comes from abroad”.