Equipme, the ‘Everything-as-a-service’ enablement platform, has secured $3.8M in a seed investment round led by La Famiglia VC. Other investors include Lightbird, Anamcara and leading business angels like Ignaz Forstmeier, Co-Founder at Personio, and Charlie Songhurst, former Head of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft.
While Netflix-like subscriptions and Uber kind on demand services have simplified our personal lives for years, this trend is now being widely adopted in B2B, as companies are struggling to deliver services internally in times of expert shortage, cost pressure and rapidly changing business demands.
Renting turnkey services from specialized providers is the easiest way for companies to receive the desired output right away and massively reduce their workload and financial investments while remaining flexible.
Equipmes vision
The vision of Equipme is to seamlessly connect companies with their providers to simplify access to services in a frictionless experience, which eliminates process breaks and manual coordination efforts in the partnership to save time and valuable resources for both sides.
Therefore, Equipme is building the operating system for the B2B subscription economy. For business customers, the B2B marketplace is an employee shop, procurement platform, and asset management portal. At the same time, it enables suppliers to offer their products and services in a modern Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) approach, while subsequently improving the process of managing the entire service lifecycle for their customers.
The SaaS platform is designed to allow companies to invite their existing service-providers, as well as making use of the constantly growing network of suppliers already connected to Equipme. Whether your business needs IT, software, furniture, construction machines, tools, or professional services, Equipme has got you covered.
To relieve central divisions like procurement, IT and backoffice, Equipme makes products and services directly available to the business via self-service while managing costs, inventory, and subscriptions in a central place.
A simplifying revolution
Paul Martin, Co-Founder and CEO of Equipme: “We see that many midsize and larger organizations today must deal with too many administrative distractions preventing them from focusing on their core mission. Our vision is that entrepreneurs can follow their dreams, while Equipme is taking care of the rest. For instance, Equipme simplifies the process of equipping employees during the onboarding process, by seamlessly integrating all relevant parties and suppliers, including the employees itself to select their preferred devices and tools. Subsequently, Equipme takes care of managing inventory, subscriptions, and related costs throughout the entire lifecycle in one central place. This is especially important in times of high-cost sensitivity and the rapidly changing macro environment. Our goal is to enable companies to build great businesses without distractions.”
Compared to other Device or Equipment as-a-Service startups, Equipme is unique in that it is the only vendor-open XaaS-platform that allows businesses to connect with any provider of their choice worldwide, without ending up in a vendor lock-in. Equipme is already being used by major IT and Telco providers in Germany, serving more than 500 organizations. The platform started with focus on the DACH region and will soon be available globally.
Alexandre Seifert, Co-Founder and COO of Equipme: “With Equipme we build the operating system for the upcoming subscription economy in B2B. As a starting point, we revolutionize how companies equip their employees to do the best work of their lives and build great companies with outstanding user experience – whatever, whenever, wherever.”
The investors
The seed investment round was led by La Famiglia alongside other investors such as Lightbird, Anamcara, and leading business angels like Ignaz Forstmeier, Co-Founder of Personio, and Charlie Songhurst, former Head of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft.
Judith Dada, Partner at La Famiglia: ‘We are extremely excited about the growth potential that lies ahead of Equipme. In today’s ever-changing business environment, decision-makers value cost efficiency and flexibility most. This is why Software as a Service has been so successful in recent years. For Equipme, IT is just the beginning – Everything-as-a-Service is on the rise and Equipme is making it easily accessible to all businesses on the supply and demand side.’
About Equipme
Equipme was founded in November 2021 by Alexandre Seifert and Paul Martin with its headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Prior to founding Equipme, they ran their own IT service provider, supplying corporates with hardware, software, and professional services. There, they were confronted with suboptimal ordering, management, and financial processes on a daily basis. Based on that experience, Alexandre and Paul sold their company and launched Equipme to help the market to overcome the pain point of manually managed customer-vendor relationships.
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