We’re proud to announce that Wercker, a startup that participated in our first 2012 accelerator program, has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Oracle. As the US tech giant put it in a press release, Wercker and Oracle share the same view that developers should be focused on what matters most, building great products and applications and together they aim to “democratize developer tooling for the modern cloud.”
“We’re excited that our container lifecycle management platform is joining the Oracle developer suite. Together we’re set on helping modern developers meet modern challenges head on.”
Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, Founder and CEO, Wercker
Wercker’s product, a continuous delivery platform for applications and microservices, allows developers to create Docker containers locally and deploy them to the cloud platforms, including AWS, Heroku, and Rackspace. To know more about Wercker’s journey from the inception to exit, check out stories by Venturebeat and Techcrunch.
Wercker is one of Amsterdam hottest startups
A few months after the Rockstart Accelerator program, Wercker attracted $1 million funding from Greylock Partners and several angel investors through the Rockstart network. In the two following VC funding rounds, Notion Capital, Tola Capital, and Inkef Capital got on board and injected a total of $6.9 million in Wercker. Wercker was also proclaimed one of Amsterdam’s hottest Tech startups in 2016 by Wired magazine.
“Micha Hernandez van Leuffen is one of the strongest Amsterdam-based startup founders we’ve worked with at Rockstart.He is a rare breed of European entrepreneurs. He connects tech, product, and business expertise at a very high level. Since the inception of Wercker, Mies understood to bridge the opportunity of operating the company with a team in Amsterdam, while simultaneously creating strong ties to San Francisco where he gained expertise, network, and—most importantly—market traction in the developer scene.”
Rune Theill, co-founder & CEO, Rockstart
Status of the 2012 batch: three startups acquired, and three more growing rapidly
Wercker is the fifth Rockstart portfolio company to be acquired and the third company to be acquired from the inaugural 2012 Rockstart Accelerator batch that consisted of ten startups. Before yesterday’s news about Wercker, Postcron was the first ever Rockstart startup to be acquired in 2015 by SocialTools, and Imgzine the second in December 2016 by Ortec.
Following the sale of Wercker to Oracle, three strong startups remain active in the Rockstart 2012 portfolio. Peerby is a P2P sharing platform that enables you to rent household items from your neighbors gives their users in over 20 cities in Europe and the United States access to $1 billion worth of products. Last year they raised a crowdfunding round of €2.2 million in just four days from 1051 backers.
PastBook is a company that makes it very easy to turn your online photos on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media accounts into a physical book. Designing your book takes less than a minute instead of several hours. Pastbook has been growing more than 800 percent in revenue YoY for the last three years in a row and was nominated for the Deloitte Rising Star Award in 2016.
The final startup from the 2012 batch is Owlin, a real-time news analysis engine that grew to 20 FTEs last year. Owlin is currently scaling up and serving customers like ING, ABN AMRO, Deloitte, KPMG, and about 40 others. The startup is planning to open a NYC office this year since Fortune 500 companies are reaching out to it to test its technology. Some 35 percent of Owlin’s revenue already originates from the US.
