Our love for WordPress is rather obvious. In the last few years, we’ve already invested in a number of WordPress companies. Next to that, we also made some other investments. All of our investments are in tech companies or in companies with a strong online presence. That just makes sense because of our own background; we can help those companies excel with our involvement, not just our money. Next to that, each investment aligns with at least, and preferably more, of our three core values:
- We are open-source fanatics and want to invest in open-source software solutions. In WordPress, that also means we ask companies we invest in to respect the GPL & the WordPress guidelines and understand the importance of the WordPress community. Some of our WordPress-related investments are Atarim, Equalize Digital, Extendify, Kanoppi, PersonalizeWP, Castos, Wildcloud, PatchStack and, previously, Strattic. Of course, this is also why we invested in Post Status, the premier WordPress business community.
- We are passionate about sustainability and want to invest in companies that provide sustainable solutions. We would like to expand our investment portfolio with products and solutions that help make the world a better (and a greener) place. We’re really excited about our investment in Peerby, a platform that helps people share tools and utilities with their neighbors. And Kanoppi, which helps companies report and measure the CO2 usage of their website so they can start improving on that metric. And Deeploy, who make AI and machine learning responsible and explainable, makes AI fit for many important decisions in people’s lives.
- We want to encourage female entrepreneurship and seek investment opportunities in women-owned companies. Marieke experienced how difficult it can be to be a female entrepreneur in the tech industry. We want to help more female-founded companies flourish. We’re proud of our investment in Kanoppi, Equalize Digital, Stieglitz, and Nina Care.
As we’ve progressed with our investments over time, we find that more companies we invest in check 2 of these 3 core values, and we actively seek out those that do.
Our investments should lead to healthy companies. We believe in and want to support those companies who do more than just make money. At the same time, making money is important. A profitable business is the only way to keep a business itself sustainable.
Hybrid investment model
In some of our investments – typically early stage and in the WordPress ecosystem- we apply a hybrid investment model. This means that we invest money but also work (either by ourselves or by our employees) into the portfolio company. Of course, we’ll work on every project together with the portfolio company. In the investment process, we’ll talk about what amount of money will be invested in ‘cash’ and what percentage will be spent by Emilia (and on what kind of people).
The advantage of these kinds of investments is that we can quickly get started with the things that need improvement and we’ll play a very active role in the operations.
Investment partners
If we do not do a hybrid investment in which we actively participate in the company, we always try to find investment partners. This means that we typically do not want to be the only investor in a company. We believe that collaboration with other investors and other expertise increases the chances of success of our portfolio companies.
