Microsoft bought and shut down this entrepreneur’s app. But now he’s raised money for an unofficial successor

German entrepreneur Christian Reber sold his Wunderlist task application to Microsoft in 2015 for an amount reportedly between $ 100 million and $ 200 million, just to watch the US technology giant close it four years later. late.

Now he has just raised funding for another application called Superlist, which he created with four other entrepreneurs, including two of the other co-founders of Wunderlist.

Reber told CNBC earlier this year that the acquisition of Wunderlist made him feel “really unhappy” and annoyed. One of the main reasons Reber was so disappointed when Microsoft shut down Wunderlist was that he thought the app had never become the product he wanted to create.

However, he did not give up there. In 2021, he launched Superlist, which he describes as the “unofficial successor to Wunderlist” and a “passionate project”.

Superlist is a task and project management application that aims to help people collaborate in a hybrid work world. It is currently still in the second phase of its release life cycle.

“What we wanted to do was build the de facto standard application for collaboration on personal projects and in business,” Reber told CNBC earlier this year, adding that there are either enterprise products like Asana and Trello, or applications for personal tasks like Things or To perform.

“I feel that nothing has nailed the bridge between the two,” he said. “Either you become like a very cluttered software, which is mainly optimized for project managers, or you get like these very personal applications for tasks that make collaboration impossible.”

Superlist is designed to help users scale a project from one person to 100 or 200 people.

The Berlin-based company announced on Monday that it had secured 10m euros ($ 11m) in an initial funding round led by venture capital firm EQT Ventures. The total investment in the company now amounts to 13.5 million euros.

“The global productivity management software market is projected to reach $ 102.98 billion by 2027, so there is a real opportunity for a tool to harness the individuality of team members and focus specifically on the challenges of the modern workplace. “Said EQT Ventures partner Ted Persson in a statement.

Superlist said it will use the new funding to double the size of its team from 20 to 40 by the end of 2022, with a focus on hiring developers, designers and leading products.

In addition to Superlist, Reber also co-founded a Microsoft PowerPoint competitor called Pitch. The four-year business, which employs about 160 people, has raised just over $ 130 million and was last valued at $ 600 million.

“I think it’s incredibly easy to raise money for technology companies right now, because there seems to be more money than companies on the market,” Reber said. “As a founder who starts companies more often, I feel like it’s never been better to raise.”