German Meta-Search Engine takes on another Investor from Industry

Chemicals producer Evonik (Essen, Germany) has announced an investment in technology company chembid GmbH (Oldenburg, Germany).  Launched in 2016 as a spin-off from chemicals formulator BÜFA Group (Oldenburg, Germany), chembid is a meta-search engine and market intelligence platform for chemical products. This investment is the second strategic partnership that chembid has entered into, after chemical distributor STOCKMEIER Group (Bielefeld, Germany) took a minority share in early 2019. Evonik is making the investment through its Evonik Venture Capital subsidiary.

As part of the transaction, Evonik will contribute knowledge from the development and operation of its proprietary digital marketplace OneTwoChem^® to the chembid platform. It will cease to operate its own platform. Already last year, Evonik’s digital laboratory assistant COATINO^®, was included in the service offering of chembid. Besides a product recommendation function, COATINO offers a voice assistant for the Paints & Coatings industry, which provides answers to complex technical questions regarding formulations and ingredients of coatings products.

No information on the size of the shareholding of Evonik and the valuation of the transaction was disclosed.

Source: chembid website, Evonik website

HGE / DCG – 09.02.2021