Holtzbrinck And Samwer Brothers Invest In Platinnetz

Holtzbrinck Ventures and the European Founders Fund have invested in Platinnetz, as the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung first reported yesterday.

Platinnetz is a social network for senior citizens targeting the growing market “of those who stayed young”. It was founded by Heike Helfenstein, Jan Bromberger und Markus Helfenstein and launched in April 2007. The amount of the investment has not been disclosed.

In related news, the European Founders Fund’s Samwer Brothers seem to stay true to their lucrative strategy of porting each and every successful concept to the German market before a localised version is available and probably are backing the just launched Doktus as well. Doktus is a plattform to publish and share documents and is largely inspired by Scripd, which raised 2.7 million Euros earlier this year. Officially Doktus has its company headquarters in Rumania and currently this is just a rumour, but Martin Weigert (in German) has dugg out quite some evidence to support this as a fact since they have used a similar pattern of front firms to hide their associations in the past.

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)