Abotic secures 1 million euro investment from Bon Venture

The Vienna-based startup entered the global market with an innovative door automation system this year. Now, they are planning to expand their business even further.

Two weeks ago, inventures.eu reported about Abotic, an Austrian startup, that sealed a major licensing contract for their innovative door automation system (read the article here). The company co-founded by Nick Manseder and Albrecht Karlusch in 2008 has now reached its next milestone: an investment of about one million euro by German social capital venture fund Bon Venture.

As a fund and foundation for social responsibility, Bon Venture focuses mainly on enterprises in the sectors of social services and products, ecology as well as transparency and social development initiatives. Previous investments include primarily German enterprises and projects such as Ashoka Germany, Solarlite, Lobby Control, Studienaktie.org and Violence Prevention Network.

A remarkable case

With their novel door automation system, Abotic provide an easy, relatively cheap and scalable solution to a problem encountered by people in wheelchairs – opening doors – and thus fit into Bon Venture’s portfolio. Yet, Abotic’s case is a remarkable one, as CEO Karlusch emphasises.

“Typically, investments of that size only happen in sectors like web and biotech, which Austria is more developed in and which generally have a higher scalability potential. It doesn’t happen often in the mechatronics sector that we are part of, so we’re definitely proud and very happy with the deal.”

Through the investment, which was finalised at the end of last week, Abotic are able to keep their technical and market risks low while helping to finance the company until break even, according to Karlusch.

Moreover, it helps Abotic with the implementation of future plans. “We want to keep developing our product in order to come up with a premium version for care facilities. The investment from Bon Venture enables us to differentiate the product even further and to do more research on other products from the medical sector. So, it’s yet another step towards internationalisation.” It looks like Abotic have good reason to be optimistic for 2013.