KIZOO provides mentoring, seed and early stage financing in SaaS, Internet & Mobile Services with a growing focus on Rejuvenation Biotech. Apart from our financial resources, we are happy to share our longtime experience in development, marketing and product management.

Early Stage Financing

We are looking for committed entrepreneurial teams with a clear focus to build high growth products. If you are looking for financing please feel free to send a presentation or anything else you think might be appropriate to highlight your venture to ventures@kizoo.com

Mentoring

A bit more early? We are happy to work with a few selected teams prior to financing on their case to develop a plan forward regarding market, product, organization and financing strategy. Take your chances to win us as a mentor and apply here

Rejuvenation Biotech

As part of Michael Greve's Forever Healthy Initiative we directly support the creation of startups turning research on molecular and cellular repair of the root causes of aging into therapies for human application.

Elevian is a Harvard spinout developing therapeutics to stimulate regenerative capacity, the body’s ability to repair itself, which declines as we age. 

Elevian’s founders have identified circulating blood factors, including GDF11, which broadly stimulate regenerative capacity in aged animals across many organs and tissues (e.g. brain, heart, pancreas, muscle, and others).  Initially planned indications include Alzheimer’s Disease, heart failure, Type II diabetes, and age-related muscle dysfunction.

Antoxerene uses proprietary next generation screening technology to identify small molecule compounds to target pathways of aging.

​The team focusses on next generation screens with higher predictive value than traditional approaches and expects first on-target therapeutic candidates for the p53/MDM2 pathway, a major oncology target, and the p53/FOXO4 pathway, a newly identified pathway involved in cellular aging.
​AgeX Therapeutics, Inc. is a biotechnology company applying technology relating to cell immortality and regenerative biology, to aging and age-related diseases. The company has three initial areas of product development: pluripotent stem cell-derived brown adipocytes; vascular progenitors; and induced Tissue Regeneration. Initial planned indications for these products are Type II diabetes, cardiac ischemia, and cancer respectively.

​When a cell reaches it's end of life or becomes damaged beyond repair it is supposed to either kill itself or signal the immune system to remove it. Unfortunately every so often this mechanism fails, the cell stays around indefinitely and starts poisoning it's environment. Over time we accumulate more and more of these harmful, death resistant senescent cells.

​A recent study in rodents has shown that clearing senescent cells can both reduce the negative effects of age-related diseases and extend the healthy lifespan by up to 35%. Oisin is developing a cellular repair therapy based on a genetically-targeted intervention to clear senescent cells from our body.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of vision loss among people over the age of 50. AMD is thought to be caused by aggregation of A2E a toxic, non-degradable cellular waste product in our eye's retina cells. Lysoclear is a molecular repair therapy based on the targeted delivery of exogenous A2E degrading enzymes to our retina cells to eliminate A2E, treat AMD and restore vision.

The team recently announced a Series-A offering to bring its product through Phase I clinical trials. LysoClear would be the first clinical candidate based on the repair and rejuvenation paradigm, pioneered by the SENS research foundation.

CellAge is aiming to increase human healthspan and reduce the incidence of age-related diseases by helping the human body destroy senescenct cells. The team is focusing on a novel approach for this challenge by developing synthetic promoters for senescence cell detection and removal.

The teams joint expertise in senescence, synthetic biology and bioinformatics gives CellAge a unique angle on improving ways how gene therapies could be targeted to senescent cells.

​To accelerate the development of actual rejuvenation therapies for human use, our Forever Healthy Foundation has teamed up with SENS Research Foundation and created the Undoing Aging Conference in Berlin. Undoing Aging is focused on the molecular and cellular of repair of age-related damage as the basis of therapies to bring aging under full medical control.

Speakers include leading researchers from around the world focused on topics including stem cells, senescent cells, immunotherapies, biomarkers and drug discovery.

SAAS, Internet & Mobile

Being part of the German internet right from the beginning, founding and growing several major internet companies ourselves, multiple exits and taking one of them public has been an incredible journey for us. Now we are even more excited to support and mentor some of our country's most promising start-ups.

Staffbase closes the intranet gap for non-desk workers. It is a ready-to-go SaaS solution to extend reach of internal communications to employees working outside the office, a group representing more than 2/3 of the global workforce.

​Employees can use the EmployeeApp on their own (private) smartphones which fundamentally reduces the costs of launching an intranet for them.

Mambu enables any financial institution to easily deliver state-of-the-art banking through its software-as-a-servcie cloud solution. Agile, flexible and open, Mambu eliminates the complexities typically associated with core banking software, at a fraction of the cost.

​Established in 2010, the Berlin ­based company works with more than 100 institutions in 30 countries worldwide.

Babbel has made learning languages fun, easy and accessible to everyone. The market-leading app consists of high-quality courses available for iOS, Android, on the desktop and Apple Watch. Currently, Babbel offers 14 learning languages (Spanish, French, English, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, Indonesian, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Russian).

​Over 400 people presently work from the company’s offices in New York and Berlin, representing 28 different nationalities between them. The company has been profitable since 2011 and has experienced 100% year-on-year growth since this time.

Shyftplan is an online shift-planning service which SMEs can use to organize and communicate with their employees. Company administrators can quickly and easily create the payroll for all employees. Shyftplan, in comparison to a tax accountant, is about 70% cheaper for generating payrolls.

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 the interview and assessment of candidates.  Exit to Xing in 2017.

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

Not only a combined hardware and software solutions is offered to clients, but also the Suitepad solution provides access to many different hotel entertainment features such as movies, newspapers, and event tickets.

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.

Providing a fully comprehensive insurance as well as all legal forms and documentations there is no hassle or risk for owners and renters. Exit to Snappcar in 2017.

MegaZebra is 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.

Founded in 2008, MegaZebra has launched several category-leading titles, such as Mahjong Trails and Solitaire Castle.

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.

REVL wants to bring this camera to the world and build a stronger community of passionate, adventurous people who love sharing their adventures with the world.

Management

Michael Greve

Michael and his brother Matthias are probably two of the most successful founders in the German-speaking Internet industry.

Among numerous ventures they founded flug.de and grew the site into one of Germany´s most successful flight booking destinations. (Sold to Otto Group). They launched lastminute.de and turned the service into the largest last-minute travel site in Germany. (Sold to Lastminute.com). Most notably the brothers founded web.de and, after successful IPO, grew the company to become one of Germany's largest Internet portals and online media businesses (sold to United Internet).

Matthias Hornberger

Matthias is CFO of Kizoo. He has been part of the senior management team 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 on the Internet, he is a competent reference person for young founders. Matthias has extensive contacts in the high-tech industry and numerous local and national networks.

Frank Schüler

Frank is Managing Director of Kizoo. He has had top management positions within the company for more than 15 years.

​Frank was leading the IPO of WEB.DE, co-founded the Kizoo Venture Capital business with Michael and Matthias, and since then helped numerous startups to grow. Among other board level assignments he is COO of the Forever Heathy Foundation, member of the board of the SENS Research Foundation, Mountain View, California and on the executive board of atevia AG, a public company for 16 years.
​Before he was a strategy consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Frank is M.Sc. (New York) and Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Ing. from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.