DGAP-News

German Startups Group confirms profit in the first half of 2016, invests again substantially in Auctionata, and achieves outperformance with its FinTech and secondary growth stage shareholdings - Seite 2

Consulting. Additionally, the company, as one of only a few German VC
investors, also acquires so-called secondary shares, i.e. existing shares
of founders and business angels for example, of successful German startups
in the growth stage. This is the case for nine shareholdings.

Since the company's first investment in a FinTech company in Q2 2013, it
was able to achieve a gross performance of 51.3% p.a. with its FinTech
portfolio segment (portfolio overall in this period: 27.7% p.a.). The
strategy of acquiring secondary shares in the so-called growth stage also
resulted in an above-average performance. Since the first investment in Q4
2013, the gross performance of secondary growth shares was 36.1% p.a.
(portfolio overall in this period: 27.2% p.a.).

Nikolas Samios, Chief Investment Officer of German Startups Group, comments
on the outperformance of both these focal segments of the portfolio,
"Through our investments as German Startups Group, we assemble the, in our
opinion, 'best of' of German startups and therefore purposefully examine a
broad spectrum within this asset class. Against this background, we
repeatedly set focal points on segments from which we, following a careful
analysis of the market conditions, expect an outperformance." CEO Christoph
Gerlinger adds, "We are pleased to confirm on the basis of the performance
achieved now already over the course of several years that our focal points
were chosen well. This applies to both the disruptive FinTech sector, which
remodels immaterial services and is therefore particularly well-suited to
rapid scaling, as well as the secondary market for shares in growth
companies that is, on an international comparison, completely
underdeveloped in Germany and that offers an especially good chance risk
ratio."

Andreas von Blottnitz, a successful serial entrepreneur and business angel/
venture capitalist, was appointed member of the supervisory board on 04
August 2016 upon request of the company. He follows his business partner
Jan Henric Buettner, with whom he mutually built up AOL Europe starting
from 1994, which was sold for 6.75 billion US dollars to AOL (USA) in 2002.
In 1997, Andreas von Blottnitz already took over the role of Managing
Director of AOL Deutschland from Jan Henric Buettner. Later on, Andreas von
Blottnitz switched to become CEO of the software startup Expertcity in
Santa Barbara, California, the provider of the internationally successful
"GoTo" products, which were acquired by Citrix Systems for 225 million US