The Hamburg-based secure server firm Protonet made history earlier this month when it raised $1 million through crowdfunding in a mere 89 minutes, smashing the Veronica Mars movie’s 4-hour record for hitting the same milestone. Now Protonet has closed its crowdfunding round at €3 million ($4.1 million).
That’s not bad for a funding round that originally sought €500,000, then upped the limit to €1.5 million once the Protonet team realized people really liked the idea of its Maya server for small teams who want to collaborate securely. Then it raised the limit again but, according to business development chief Philipp Baumgaertel, “obviously at some point we had to say this is enough money for us to last the next 12 months.”
“We were getting lots of calls and emails from hundreds of people saying ‘We want to invest, please come on, re-open’,” Baumgaertel said of the repeated decision to raise the round’s limit. “We thought if there’s such a desire from the crowd, why should we shut the door?”
One reason to shut the door eventually, of course, was that the campaign was being conducted on Seedmatch, meaning investors get a cut of Protonet’s future profits and stand to benefit if and when the company eventually goes public (they don’t get voting rights though). Upping the limit on the round didn’t dilute what the round’s early investors had signed up for, but from the main shareholders’ perspective the party had to reach an end at some point – for now at least.
“We’d rather optimize those €3 million as well as we can and then open another round,” Baumgaertel said. Protonet previously crowdfunded €200,000 through Seedmatch at the start of 2013, then picked up $1.2 million from local angel backers.
The fact that the company is now swimming in much more cash than it anticipated, will lead to swifter internationalization of its product. As Baumgaertel explained, the original plan was to start pushing beyond the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) around the middle of next year. “Now we can already take the first steps in this direction,” he said.
That means becoming active further afield in Europe, so as to learn more about customer support, import and export and so on. Then onwards to the U.S., which Protonet hopes will provide a springboard for the rest of the world.
Perhaps you can expect to see Protonet’s orange box and its secure collaboration software in operation near you over the coming years.
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