Being killed by Microsoft after the acquisition, this businessman continues to build a ‘successor’

German businessman Christian Reber once sold his to-do list app Wunderlist to Microsoft in 2015 for what is believed to be about $100-200 million, only to be left behind by the American tech giant. completely shut down the app 4 years later.

However, he is raising capital for Superlist, an app he and four other entrepreneurs built, including two former co-founders of Wunderlist.

Reber said to CNBC earlier this year that selling Wunderlist to Microsoft made him feel really unhappy and upset. One of the main reasons Reber was frustrated was that Microsoft’s shutdown of Wunderlist made him feel like the app was never a product he built himself.

But Reber didn’t give up there. In 2021, he launched Superlist, an app described as the unofficial “successor” of Wunderlist and a project made for his passion.

Founder Christian Reber. Photo: Pitch

Superlist is a project and task management app that aims to help people collaborate in a “hybrid” working world. This application is in the second phase of the software release lifecycle.

“What we want to do is build a standard, practical application that enables people to collaborate on personal and work projects,” Reber tells WebMD. CNBC. It’s a mix of business products like Asana and Trello and personal to-do list apps like Things or To Do.

“I don’t feel like there’s an app that combines those two elements,” says Reber. Therefore, Superlist is designed to help users scale a project from one person to 100 or 200 people.

Earlier this week, the Berlin-based company announced it had received 10 million euros ($11 million) in a seed funding round, led by venture capital fund EQT Ventures. The total investment capital of the company is currently 13.5 million euros.

The global productivity software market size is forecast to reach $102.98 billion by 2027, so there’s still plenty of room for a tool like Superlist to grow, according to Ted Persson, Director of EQT Ventures.

Superlist said it will use the new capital to double its team size from 20 to 40 by the end of 2022, hiring programmers, designers and product leads.

In addition to Superlist, Reber also co-founded Pitch, a rival to Microsoft PowerPoint. The four-year-old business, with about 160 employees, has raised more than $130 million and was most recently valued at $600 million.

“I think it’s very easy to raise capital for tech companies right now,” Reber said. As a founder who regularly sets up a company, I have never felt that raising capital has been this convenient.”

According to Thach Lam