Massive congratulations to chauffeur service portal Blacklane on being named the fastest growing startup in Germany.
Speaking about the company’s win, its co-founder and CEO Jens Wohltorf said:
Blacklane’s success is based on amazingly talented people combined with a great network of drivers around the world. I’m grateful to be surrounded by such an enthusiastic and dedicated team that has built and globally scaled our digital and physical product in less than three years. The professionalism of our driver partners is also essential; they do a great job to consistently overachieve the high-quality expectations of our valued customers.
TNW and Adyen hosted the German awards event last week at the company’s office in Berlin. The five finalists were Blacklane, Foodpanda, Delivery Hero, Gini and minubo. The evening featured presentations with stories about the startups’ successes and a panel discussion on how tech can fuel growth.
The consensus among the speakers was that Germany’s biggest advantage is the diversity and availability of talent. The startups also believe that having access to such a large home market offers huge benefits when it comes time to scale internationally.
The Berlin Tech5 event was the second of this year’s European regional finals. They began in London and will be continuing in Amsterdam, Paris and Stockholm over the coming weeks. Each of the winners will go on to speak at the final during The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam next month.
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Tech5’s goal is to identify Europe’s fastest growing young tech companies. Finalists were selected based on their growth rate between 2012 and 2015, using actual revenue and employee data. They had to be less than five years old, offer a scalable tech-driven product or service and have revenues of more than €200,000.
Blacklane will be appearing onstage at TNW Conference Europe, but with Tech5 wildcard voting open, you can still cast your vote for one of the other 30 Tech5 companies to join the regional winners at the big event!
Read next: YPlan named the Tech5 UK fastest growing tech startup
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