Evonik has invested in chembid, the largest meta-search engine for chemicals, in order to strengthen the company's e-commerce activities and support the development of an independent marketing platform for the chemical industry.
Evonik's venture capital arm has invested in chembid, the world's largest search engine and market intelligence platform for chemicals, to strengthen the company's e-commerce activities. The investment supports the development of an independent digital sales platform for the chemical industry.
The family-owned start-up, which is based in Oldenburg, Germany, was initiated in 2016 by BÜFA GmbH & Co. KG, and has since developed a meta-search engine that connects buyers with suppliers, and provides a dashboard of market intelligence such as price trends and demand patterns by analysing the search data with intelligent algorithms.
"As sales platforms gain traction in the chemical industry, it's important to be a driver in the digital service space," said Bernhard Mohr, head of Evonik Venture Capital. "A strong, comprehensive and independent platform is desirable for the chemical industry as a whole. This investment supports that idea by accelerating the development of the industry's biggest meta-search engine."
The platform already has over 50,000 users a month from more than 150 countries, and can count on the STOCKMEIER Group as an investor since 2019.
How chembid works
Like other meta search engines, chembid forwards the search query to a large number of domain-specific search engines and returns a unified result. Buyers can find chemical suppliers from all over the world and compare product offers. Manufacturers and distributors of chemicals who engage with chembid increase the visibility of their digital offerings and can ultimately generate new customers and increase chemical sales via the platform.
Evonik will contribute the knowledge gained from the development and operation of its OneTwoChem® digital marketplace to chembid, discontinuing its own platform.
"Supporting the development of chembid is an intelligent way to develop our e-commerce activities further and reach a broader customer base," said Henrik Hahn, chief digital officer of Evonik. "OneTwoChem taught us much about digital customer experience, which is the quality of the online interactions that a customer has with our brand. We are happy to bring in our expertise in this area."
Evonik is also enhancing chembid's offerings by making its digital laboratory assistant, COATINO®, available on the platform. Besides its product recommendation engine, COATINO® also offers a voice assistant for the coatings industry, providing answers to questions about formulations and ingredients for paints.
The inclusion of COATINO® on the platform will drive an increasing number of users to the tool and enable Evonik to accelerate its development.
"We are very pleased to have Evonik on board as an investor," said Felix Thalmann, chief executive officer of BÜFA. "Just like BÜFA, Evonik has a strong focus on innovation and digitalization and so has much to offer in the development of chembid. Coatino is a great example of how we can boost the quality of the services on our platform."
The parties have agreed not to disclose the financial terms of the deal.