About one quarter of German venture capital is applied in the Ruhr.
The new African fund of Hasso Plattner Ventures, a German venture-capital firm, is making an investment.
The rest comes from the Frankfurt office of 3i, a British company.In stereotype, "German venture capital" is an oxymoron.
"German venture capitalists had this idea in front of them, and they didn't do anything about it".
Daimler, the German car manufacturer, invested an undisclosed amount in Carpooling.com, whose other backers include a German venture capital firm, Earlybird.
Now, backed by investors like the Blackstone Group and GE Capital, Callahan Associates International is already building advanced cable systems in Spain and France and has raised nearly $8 billion to pay for its German venture.
A report written by the German venture firm Earlybird turns preconceptions on their head: for its size, Europe's V.C. market may be more successful than that of the United States.
After getting burned by the dot-com bust, German venture capitalists have largely shied away from making big investments, preferring to finance early-stage companies with checks of less than $2 million.
Thanks to the fact that a friend of theirs, a former New York University student named Shirley Cook, befriended a German venture capitalist during a ski trip in Austria, they are sufficiently financed.
He has been secretive about his sources of financing, but a prospectus for a new junk-bond offering earlier this month disclosed that he recently sold a 35percentt stake in his German venture to NTL Communications, which owns cable systems in Britain.
