WE HELP YOUNG STARTUP TEAMS GROW

KIZOO provides mentoring, seed, and follow-on financing with a focus on rejuvenation biotech.

Having been entrepreneurs, VCs, and mentors in both, high growth tech and biotech companies ourselves for many years, with multiple exits and massive value created for our startup’s founders, we now bring this experience to the emerging field of rejuvenation biotech – a young industry that will eventually become much bigger than today’s largest technology markets.

If you are looking for financing and support, please feel free to send your story to ​​ventures@kizoo.com

Accelerating Rejuvenation Biotech

Rejuvenation/longevity biotech is a new, emerging field of medicine. It aims to prevent and reverse the diseases of aging by addressing their common root cause, the aging process itself. Rejuvenation therapies aim to reverse or repair age-related cellular changes such as molecular waste, calcification, tissue stiffening, loss of stem cell function, genetic alterations, and impaired energy production.

Kizoo focuses on “Lighthouse” investments in never-done-before technologies that, if successful, would have an exceptional, global impact on extending people’s healthy lifespans. By demonstrating that such therapies are achievable, uncomplicated, and inexpensive, we strive to inspire scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, and the general public about the humanitarian and economic potential.

Being part of Mira Holding, our investment activities complement the mission of our sister organization, the Forever Healthy Foundation, to accelerate the transition to a world without age-related diseases.

The Rejuvenation Startup Summit hosted by the Forever Healthy Foundation, is a vibrant networking event that aims to accelerate the development of the rejuvenation biotech industry.

The summit brings together startups, members of the longevity venture capital/investor ecosystem, and researchers interested in founding or joining a startup – all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan.

Technology Ventures

​Having been part of the German Internet right from the beginning, founding, funding, and developing several major Internet companies ourselves, it has been an incredible journey for us.

With our roots in technology venture capital, Kizoo came to seed and mentor several of Germany’s internet unicorns. While not making any new investments in this area, we still remain among the largest shareholders of our heavyweights.

Staffbase solves modern employee communication challenges, and helps build a best-in-class employee experience.

​Mambu – Composable banking. The cloud banking platform.
​A new approach to banking technology that’s fast & more agile.

Babbel has made learning languages fun, easy and accessible to everyone. The market-leading app consists of high-quality courses in 14 learning languages (Spanish, French, English, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, Indonesian, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Russian).

MOQO is the SaaS-engine for shared mobility services. Its cloud-based platform enables everyone to offer shared mobility services with outstanding quality and exceptional economy of scale.

Shyftplan is an online shift-planning service that SMEs can use to organize and communicate with their employees. Company administrators can quickly and easily create the payroll for all employees.

Prescreen is an e-recruiting solution that enables organizations to optimize their recruiting process. The system helps HR departments in the advertising of job vacancies, the search and recruitment process, as well as interviewing and assessment of candidates.
​Exit to Xing in 2017.

Suitepad is a new communication channel that brings hotels and their guests closer together, renders an even more comfortable guests experience, and yields additional financial value for hotels.

Tamyca is Germany’s first and leading peer-to-peer carsharing marketplace, connecting car owners whose vehicles are sitting idle for most hours of the day with people who need a car.
Exit to Snappcar in 2017.

MegaZebra is a developer and publisher of Social Games. Its platform allows users of social networks to play online games against their friends. Millions of games are being played by its users.

REVL is a new kind of action camera, a better camera. One that allows you to enjoy the moment, knowing your footage will look great and you can spend less time editing and more time having fun.

Management

Michael Greve

Michael on twitter: @epicoun

Michael is one of the most successful technology entrepreneurs in Germany. He co-founded companies like WEB.DE and lastminute.de and is the initial investor in several German unicorns, such as Babbel, Staffbase, and Mambu.

Forever Healthy started out more than a decade ago as a personal quest to shed the extremely unhealthy lifestyle he acquired while building his own startups, and over time turned into the focus of his entrepreneurial energy: To accelerate the transition to a world without age-related diseases.

Forever Healthy‘s initiatives include hosting the annual Rejuvenation Startup Summit, funding translational research on the root causes of aging, and providing evidence-based evaluations of new rejuvenation therapies.

Activities at Michael’s venture capital firm Kizoo complement the mission of Forever Healthy. Kizoo’s focus is on the creation, mentoring and financing of rejuvenation biotech startups that turn basic research into therapies for human use. Investments include Cellvie, Cyclarity, Revel, Elastrin, LIfT, and MoglingBio.

Matthias Hornberger

Matthias is CFO of Kizoo. He has been part of the senior management team of the group since the IPO of the AG in 2000.

With his long-standing experience in the investment sector and his comprehensive knowledge of typical features of successful business models, he is a competent reference person for young founders. Matthias has extensive contacts in the high-tech industry and numerous local and national networks.

Before joining the AG he had a career in Investment Banking. He studied Business Administration at Universities in Mannheim and Toronto (Dipl.-Kfm).

Frank Schüler

Frank Schueler is Managing Director of Kizoo.

Starting to work with Michael in 1999, Frank led the IPO of web.de, co-founded the Kizoo Venture Capital business together with Michael and Matthias, and since then helped numerous startups to grow. Among Frank’s other board-level assignments mostly at Kizoo portfolio companies, like Cyclarity Therapeutics and Cellvie Inc., he is on the executive board of Atevia AG, a public company for 16 years, Chief Operating Officer of the Forever Healthy Foundation and co-founder of the Rejuvenation Startup Summit and the Undoing Aging conference series.

Previously, he was a strategy consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Frank holds a M.Sc. (New York) and a diploma in Business Administration and Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.

Patrick Burgermeister

Patrick Burgermeister is an expert in life science investing with a double background in molecular biology (Biozentrum Basel) and business administration (HSG Sankt Gallen). He joined Kizoo in 2019 coming from the venture capital group BioMedPartners where he was one of the partners. Moreover, his industry career encompasses also banking (as a senior analyst for pharma/biotech) and pharma (as a senior portfolio manager at Novartis).

Patrick supports various biotech companies as a director on their boards, was a successful business developer for early-stage biotech companies and led collaboration and licensing deals with public and private companies. He headed business development at several companies including Apeiron Biologics and BioVersys.