Car subscription startup Finn has topped the newly launched Sifted 50: Germany — a ranking of the 50 startups with the strongest revenue growth in the country over the past three financial years.
Munich-based Orbem, a company that uses AI to rapidly make sense of MRI scans, places second on the ranking; WhatsApp marketing platform Charles is third.
When asked about the secrets of his company’s revenue growth, Finn cofounder and CEO Maximilian Wühr says the trick is for any company to not over-extend itself. “We simply focus on creating the digital face for the customer. Logistics and other operations are all areas where there are established players already, so we try to concentrate on what we can do best,” he says.
The company is expanding in the US — but at a moderate pace, as it faces higher costs there. “German customers are more valuable. We’re at a higher scale here, marketing is cheaper because people know us, insurance is cheaper [and] supply is cheaper because we have higher negotiation power,” says Wühr.
One big tailwind for Finn’s growth is customers who are curious to try electric vehicles but are scared to take the plunge and buy. “We’re lucky to be in an industry where there is a lot of change happening,” he adds.
Germany’s high-flyers
Strikingly, there are startups from 16 German cities and towns represented in the top 50, which shows how widely dispersed tech talent is in the country. Berlin is home to the most companies (22), followed by Munich with nine and Cologne and Hamburg with three apiece.
B2B SaaS is the dominant business category (23 companies). The next most-represented industry is fintech (eight companies) followed by consumer tech (seven), climate tech (six), deeptech (four) and healthtech (two).
Three of the companies on the ranking are unicorns: solar business Enpal (14th), which has raised €3.6bn (including debt) from investors; device rental startup Everphone (24th), which has raised €580m and employee comms platform Staffbase (43rd), which has raised €180m.
HV Capital, Plug and Play and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology are the most active investors in the ranking, backing six companies each. HV has backed three of the top four companies — Finn, Charles and vacation booking platform Tourlane — as well as Enpal.
Germany’s 10 fastest-growing startups
Finn — Monthly car subscriptions
Orbem — Combines MRI with AI to scan and classify objects
Charles — WhatsApp marketing specialist
Tourlane — Vacation planning and booking platform
N8n — Open source workflow automation platform
Anybill — Enables companies to generate digital receipts
Aily Labs — AI-for-enterprise provider
Likeminded — Online access to mental health experts
The Exploration Company — Building reusable rockets
Akirolabs — Procurement management platform
Sifted’s research team used their proprietary data to identify and contact relevant high-growth startups. Applications were accepted from July 8 to September 23.
To be eligible, companies had to meet the following criteria: headquartered in Germany; founded in or after 2014; maximum headcount of 999; private and independent; majority of revenue must be generated by proprietary technology; at least three years of revenue data; and revenue (annualised if necessary) of at least €50k (or £42k) in the base year (2020 or 2021) and at least €500k (or £416k) in the latest financial year (2022 or 2023). Companies were required to submit signed documentation to support disclosed financial information not publicly available.
Sifted Leaderboards do not claim to be exhaustive as private company data can be difficult to acquire. Leaderboards are based on historical financial data and are no guarantee of future company performance.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/finn-sifted-leaderboard-germany/
