Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Cringle, a German mobile app for P2P money transfers, announced it has signed a €1 million deal on “media-for-equity” with WeltN24 GmbH, a subsidiary of the German media and publishing mastodon Axel Springer.
The Cringle statement does not reveal any further details on the agreement, but it is understood that the fintech startup will make use of Axel Springer’s channels to promote itself and will develop common marketing concepts and strategies with the media giant.
“For us, Axel Springer is the ideal partner to make a good product more popular and to establish it on the market,” Cringle CEO Joschka Friedag said. “Having been successful with Cringle on the German market for quite a while, we now believe that attracting the broad public to our app is an appropriate next step. But the Axel Springer deal will help us spread Cringle not just in Germany. In fact, our launch in Austria within the next few weeks is still on schedule, and Axel Springer will help us attract considerable media attention for the launch.”
Currently Cringle runs a funding campaign on the German-based equity crowdfunding site Companisto. The company, valued at 4.1 million euro, is offering 8.89% of its shares and has set an investment threshold of 100 000 euro and a funding goal of 400 000 euro. With 45 days left till the end of campaign, Cringle is over 50% overfunded and has raised €506 710 from 1068 investors.
Cringle was founded in 2014 with a 100 000 euro grant. Later in the year the company received 500 000 euro from an angel investor and last August got another 500 000 euro from debt financing.
In January 2016 already had 30 000 downloads. According to the latest data in Google Play, it has between 10 000 and 50 000 downloads on Android devices. By June the users of Cringle have transferred nearly 1 million euro.
The application lets users send money to the friends in their contact list, almost instantly. The recipient does not have to even install Cringle. The application is partnered with the German Deutsche Kreditbank AG and complies with German regulations. Cringle is due to launch in Austira shortly, in partnership with Solarisbank.
Axel Springer owns the largest daily by circulation in Europe – the tabloid Bild and all its offshoots, Die Welt, the German editions of the magazines Rolling Stone and Metal Hammer, the business, celebrity and technology news site Business Insider, the European version of the Politico website, tabloids and more reputable publications in Central European countries, numerous web portals for cars, jobs and real estate, etc.
