Carsten Coesfeld’s Post

Many congratulations to Paul Kelly and the whole DK community on 50 amazing years of Dorling Kindersley today! 50 years of curiosity, 50 years of being the window to the world for the whole family, 50 years of being a true British publishing icon! Founded by creative geniuses Christopher Dorling and Peter Kindersley with the idea to revolutionize illustrated publishing, DK became a great success story after all. I am proud to be a part of it. DK has undergone a major transformation in recent years and is now set up for the digital age working closely with its Penguin Random House sister companies. The success speaks for itself: DK is more successful than ever before. Once again, my heartfelt congratulations to Paul and his team. Stay curious everyone! #DK #DorlingKindersley #PenguinRandomHouse #publishing #books

At Hinterland of Things last week, I was invited to join Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck and Frank Seidensticker on a panel on the topic of "Traction, Trust & Tradition: The Heart of B2B Entrepreneurship" (moderated by Thorsten Giersch). Many thanks for this inspiring exchange – also after the panel in numerous individual discussions with many founders and investors. Every year, the Founders Foundation gGmbH team around Dominik Gross manages to build a bridge between the start-up and venture capital world with the 'Hinterland of Things'. I'm already looking forward to Hinterland 2025! #hinterlandofthings #foundersfoundation #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #bertelsmanninvestments Photos: Julian Huke

I am thrilled to announce our recent investment in Mistral AI. As a European company, Mistral has established itself among the few leading large language models providers globally and one of the few true open source solutions. We have been following Founder Arthur Mensch since the very beginning and have been impressed by the company's efficiency and rapid progress in the last year. In addition to our funding, I am also excited to be working on several use cases and cooperations with Mistral. https://lnkd.in/eYmNGsTD #BertelsmannInvestments #EmpoweringEntrepreneurs #GenAI #MistralAI #VentureCapital

Huge congrats to my colleague Annabelle Long! This is truly remarkable! Annabelle has made it to the “The World's Best Venture Capital Investors In 2024” list of Forbes. In addition to your role as a founder of BAI Capital, Forbes focusses on Stori, the leading digital bank in Mexico, where Annabelle is an early investor. Well deserved, Annabelle! This is a real Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA Entrepreneur success story. I look forward to all the things we will shape together in future! https://lnkd.in/gmYyBTVx #EmpoweringEntrepreneurs #Forbes #BertelsmannAsiaInvestments #VentureCapital #Stori

In recent months we have successfully expanded our investment activities in the promising growth market of India. Our Bertelsmann India Investments Team around Pankaj Makkar has made investments in the mid double-digit million range in the e-commerce platform Rozana.in, the beauty start-up NAT HABIT, and the logistics platform LetsTransport – each one is a very impressive entrepreneurial success story on its own with very different business models. I am as impressed by the entrepreneurial qualities of their Co-Founders and CEOs Ankur D., Swagatika Das and Pushkar Singh as I am by the potential of each business in the Indian market. Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA has participated very successfully in the Indian growth market for many years – a big thank you to Shobhna Mohn and Pankaj. We will continue this path with new innovative investments. Keep you posted. #BertelsmannInvestments #BertelsmannIndiaInvestments #India #VentureCapital #EmpoweringEntrepreneurs https://lnkd.in/dh9aU9cd,

Andreas Barth, today is your first day as CEO of Riverty. It is a real pleasure to welcome you on board of our financial services business that is part of my responsibilities as Executive Board member of Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA. Your entrepreneurial success at Arvato with customers from the tech industry from all around the world makes you a perfect fit for this role. Wishing you and the whole riverty team lots of success! I look forward to working with you.

Congratulations to Gero Hesse! Personalwirtschaft.de is honoring 50 HR thought leaders on the occasion of the magazine’s 50th anniversary. Among them is Gero. He “has built up an impressive HR marketing business”, the magazine says. If anyone deserves this honor, it is you, dear Gero. With a great entrepreneurial vision, you set the pace for an entire industry. You are a great Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA entrepreneur and you and your EMBRACE team are transforming the HR tech industry. More to come. I am looking forward to many more exciting projects and that we will continue on this path together. #GeroHesse #Personalwirtschaft #Entrepreneur #BertelsmannInvestments #EMBRACE https://lnkd.in/eBaymdfJ

2023 was an exciting year for Bertelsmann Investments. We made significant progress in executing our strategy: Venture capital activities: - Our venture capital investment teams of BAI Capital, Bertelsmann India Investments, BDMI made 51 new and follow-on investments - We are now invested in 69 AI companies including Papercup (AI powered video dubbing), Phare Health (healthcare DRG coding automation thru gen AI; former Google Deepmind team) and Aleph Alpha (Germany’s leading large language model) Bertelsmann Next growth program: - We have seen high momentum in our digital health investing activities and since 2022 invested more than €90 million. Investment highlights include Patient21 (leading tech-driven dental roll-up in Germany; w/ Pitango and Target Global), Doccla (European leader in remote patient monitoring; w/ General Catalyst), QuantHealth (AI-powered in silico modelling of clinical trials; w/ Pitango) and deepc (radiology AI AppStore; w/ Sofinnova Partners) - Our pharma tech platform ROTE LISTE® acquired EXTEDO (leading player in regulatory affairs technology) and invested in Docuvera developer ASC (Author-it Software Co.) (medical component publishing) - Our HR tech platform EMBRACE made two significant bolt-on acquisitions with Studyflix (leading young talent platform in GSA) and milch & zucker - HR-Tech & HR-Agency (applicant tracking system developer) What a great year! Many thanks to the entire team at Bertelsmann Investments, our founders, co-investors and partners around the world! 2024 is off to a good start. At Bertelsmann Investments our ambition is to empower entrepreneurs all around the world. I very much look forward to building on the successes of recent years and continuing to develop our portfolio over the long term for Bertelsmann. I will keep you posted. #bertelsmanninvestments #empoweringentrepreneurs #venturecapital #growth #2023recap https://lnkd.in/eiK3n-FB

Update on our digital health activities: I am very excited that the pharma tech company EXTEDO has become part of Bertelsmann Investments. Munich-based EXTEDO is a leading provider of software solutions and services in the field of Regulatory Information Management. Thereby they serve both life science customers as well as public authorities. EXTEDO’s development is an entrepreneurial success story and the acquisition another milestone in expanding our pharma tech unit. The potential we see in conjunction with our portfolio companies Docuvera and ROTE LISTE® is extremely promising. Looking ahead, we will continue to strategically grow our pharma tech unit through organic initiatives as well as additional targeted acquisitions. A very warm welcome to the entire EXTEDO team around Martin Schmid to Bertelsmann Investments. I am looking forward to our joint ride. Martin Schmid Ina Scharfen Peter Koop Deniz Pielsticker Tobias Beer #pharmatech #extedo #digitalhealth #bertelsmannnext #bertelsmanninvestments https://lnkd.in/eKct4Vi7