Samwer Brothers invest in Facebook
German Internet entrepreneurs, the Samwer Brothers, have become the latest new shareholders in Facebook, according to a Reuters story that cites one of the brothers, Alexander Samwer.
Samwer said the brothers have taken an undisclosed stake in the company and that they’ll be Facebook’s strategic partners in Europe.
This is notable because the brothers previously bankrolled StudiVZ, the Facebook in Germany, in 2005, shortly after Facebook became a major success. StudiVZ was sold last year to Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH — a German publishing group that had previously invested in the company. The brothers have also earned a reputation of backing rip-offs of successful U.S. companies. One of their companies, Frazr, was an almost an exact duplicate of Twitter, for example, another was Hitflip.de, a clone of Peerflix.
But the relationship with Facebook is apparently warming up, and we’re wondering if this heralds a deeper partnership, or even merger between Facebook and StudiVZ, one of the largest college-based networks in Europe, popular mainly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and reporting more than four million members mid-way through last year.
The brothers’ stake in Facebook is likely quite small. Microsoft got a mere 1.6 percent of Facebook, in return for its $240 million investment. The Samwer Brothers are typically angel or early-stage investors in companies, and invest nowhere near that amount in their deals.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
