Today, we would like to introduce Brandenburg Labs’ parent company, Brandenburg Ventures GmbH (BV), an early-stage-oriented management and venture capital company.
In the early days, our CEO, Karlheinz Brandenburg, best known as the co-inventor of MP3, was involved with various startups from the music and audio technology industries. He supported them with his outstanding entrepreneurship skills, including incubating their innovative ideas and funding/sponsorship. While this responsibility added loads of paperwork to his existing commitments, he soon realized that he could initiate his own company. By doing so, he was able to get assistance from a team of excellent business experts.
In 2009, he founded Brandenburg Ventures aiming to support technology transfer, university startups, and the idea of entrepreneurship in general through financial and voluntary commitment.
Karlheinz’s successful entrepreneurial skills were significantly exhibited by the worldwide marketing success of MP3 and AAC. Thus, he launched the company as a private-sector investment and management company to bundle his entrepreneurial activities.
Since its establishment, Brandenburg Ventures has been actively helping innovative Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) centric companies with early-stage funding and its global network within the digital media ecosystem.
Even though most of the startups under the venture are working mainly in the area of media technology, the focus of Brandenburg Venture’s investment is vast and diverse. The best examples, in this case, are the growing ventures enginsight (IT security), Zeilenwert (ebook services), and SecondSol GmbH, (marketplace for renewable energies), and GIAX (up to 10G Ethernet while using inhouse existing coax-cable systems).
After he concluded his commitments at Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau in 2019, Karlheinz used part of his share from the MP3 patent royalties as seed funding for Brandenburg Labs, aspiring to create a leading audio technology company in the world.
Therefore, BV’s financial activities are currently focused on the development and support of BLS. Nevertheless, further, smaller new investments are also planned, and the continued active support of the existing portfolio is assured and will be expanded.
Moreover, Brandenburg Ventures is a partner and shareholder of various successful companies such as plazz, Enginsight, Music DNA, GIAX, CrowdArchitects, and Zeilenwert. Furthermore, the venture incubates and cultivates several thriving businesses and projects in Germany.
The venture is reinforced by Dipl.-Kfm. Peter Agardi, the managing director of Brandenburg Ventures. He supports Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karlheinz Brandenburg as a Chief Representative since 2011. Peter has extensive experience in the fields of entrepreneurship, company formation and financing, business development, and M&A. He is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Brandenburg Labs and holds mandates on supervisory boards and advisory boards of various partner companies.
To learn more about the current portfolio, the investment process & criteria, and the added value of Brandenburg Ventures as an investor or supporter for your start-up, visit https://brandenburg-ventures.com/.
