Ampolon Ventures has already founded three ventures

The venture subsidiary established by Aareon in 2018 engages closely with the start-up scene to explore promising digital and user-centric solutions. As a result of this process, the company has made its first three investments.

Ampolon Ventures, a venture subsidiary of the Aareon Group, Europe’s leading provider of systems and consulting services for the property industry and its partners, has founded its first three ventures: Ophigo, foxxbee and Ecaria.

Ophigo, the first venture, offers a platform that enables users to perform digital office searches. “We’ve already established several partnerships with commercial real estate agents and owners and are seeing a rise in the use of our office search platform,” says Ophigo co-founder Valerio Siviero.

The second venture, foxxbee, is a digital interior design consultancy. “We offer our customers interior design advice that’s digitally accessible and affordable,” states co-founder Ramin v. d. Leyen, describing the basic idea behind the business model. “We launched our platform last month and are pleasantly surprised by the number of initial orders.”

The latest venture is Ecaria. This company helps caregiving family members to plan and organise care services digitally, thus enabling successful care at home. “In a time when the population is getting older, family members don’t necessarily live in the same place and older people want to continue living in their own four walls if possible, digital solutions can provide valuable support,” co-founder Julia Backhaus points out.

Arash Houshmand, Managing Director of Ampolon Ventures, explains: “As a young, innovative company in the property sector, we aim to build up ventures that offer pioneering solutions. With Ophigo, foxxbee and Ecaria, we’re involved in three ventures with a promising future. To get there, we went through an in-depth collaborative selection process during which we discussed and validated ideas and created the business models from scratch.” Houshmand goes on to stress: “Founders who work with us benefit from our network of experts — as part of the established European market leader Aareon — as well as from sparring with us on issues such as financing and market entry. We believe that ambitious and resilient founders who are passionate about their idea can be very successful. Our focus is on identifying the right team and providing the necessary support to unlock this potential.”

Commenting from the perspective of the Aareon Group, CEO Dr Manfred Alflen adds: “It’s part of our corporate culture to keep developing our business with a view to the future. This requires us to always think outside the box in order to broaden our corporate horizon. That’s why we have our venture subsidiary Ampolon Ventures investing in new business models which we are developing in parallel to our existing core business.”

Aareon, a subsidiary of the Aareon Bank Group, Wiesbaden, is the leading provider of consulting and system services for the European property industry and its partners in the digital age. The Aareon Group provides its customers with groundbreaking and secure solutions in the fields of consulting, software and services to optimise IT-based business processes and expand business models. The international transfer of knowledge within the organisation, user-centric development methods and collaboration with PropTech companies support the continued development and expansion of the Aareon Smart World portfolio. Aareon’s own venture company develops ideas for new services and business models together with the start-up community.

Around 3,000 clients of the technology leader manage more than 10 million units across Europe. The Aareon Group is an international company with 40 locations, including 15 in DACH region. In addition to offices in DACH region, the company has representative locations in Finland, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Aareon operates its own development company in Romania. The Aareon Group employs over 1,700 people, more than one-third of them outside Germany. In 2019, Aareon generated revenue of around €251.9 million and operating income (EBIT) of €38.8 million.