Dusseldorf In the second year of the corona pandemic, more happened on the market for remote access software than was expected: While Teamviewer, the stock market star of last year, crashed due to management errors on the capital market, a small competitor suddenly made a name for itself. Anydesk announced this Wednesday the entry of new investors, who are participating with 60 million euros. The young software company is now valued at almost 600 million euros.
The financing round shows that investors continue to consider the remote maintenance market to be lucrative. The start-up Anydesk, like the MDax company Teamviewer, provides the software infrastructure behind the home office and solutions that service technicians use to solve computer problems remotely. The analytics firm Fortune Business Insight expects the market for remote access to desktop computers to rise to more than four billion euros in 2027. In addition, there is the networking of many other devices – whether in the home or in the factory.
The market value of Teamviewer with more than 2.7 billion euros is still well above the valuation of Anydesk. In addition, the product portfolio is much larger. Even so, it is noteworthy that international investors, led by General Atlantic, are now betting on the competitor.
On the one hand, the two companies are not only in the global competition for customers, but also in close combat for employees. Anydesk was founded seven years ago in Stuttgart, only 40 kilometers away from the Teamviewer headquarters in Göppingen. In addition, both companies share a common past: The Anydesk founders are former employees of Teamviewer.
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Anydesk co-founder and CEO Philipp Weiser knew pretty well who his company would have to compete with. When asked about the chances against Teamviewer, he said in an interview with the Handelsblatt: “It was clear to us from the start that we had to be ten times better than the competition.” You have to be an order of magnitude better for the first users to accept compromises in terms of functionality and try something new.
Attack mode: start-up wants to be ten times better than the market leader
From the founder’s point of view, arguments in favor of Anydesk are a shorter download time, a lower number of clicks required to get the software up and running, optimized image quality and minimized latency. “For support staff, our solution offers measurable time savings,” says Weiser.
Its new investors have identified Anydesk as the technology and price leader. Among them is General Atlantic partner Achim Berg, who is also President of the Bitkom industry association. “Combining source code like this brings speed and is really a masterpiece from a technological point of view,” says Berg. The solution can hardly be copied for competitors. Before making the investment decision, his company interviewed customers intensively, among other things.
It is not known how much money will flow directly into the start-up from the current financing round. At General Atlantic, Weiser speaks of a “strategic partner”. The podcast of the portal “deutsche-startups.de” recently reported that previous shareholders would want to sell shares in a deal with General Atlantic. The company doesn’t say anything about that.
Nor does it want to provide any information on the capital raised in previous financing rounds A and B. According to earlier media reports, Insight Partners from the USA, EQT with headquarters in Stockholm and Possible Ventures from Munich had invested a total of almost 18 million euros. “We have always been cash flow positive since we released the first version,” emphasizes company boss Philipp Weiser. In other words: Anydesk does not actually have a large need for capital.
According to the company, the Anydesk solution has been installed 500 million times so far. Weiser speaks of 40 million active users and 600,000 simultaneous sessions at the peak of use in the past seven days. However, the majority of these users do not pay for it. As usual with the business model, Anydesk offers a free version to convince developers and IT service providers of their own offer.
Anydesk makes Teamviewer difficult to explain to analysts
Teamviewer also has problems converting these users into paid software subscribers. Anydesk puts the number of its paying customers at 80,000, most of them from the segment of small and medium-sized companies. Other customers Anydesk advertises with are Bosch, McDonald’s and Google. In the future, the company wants to focus even more on the needs of its corporate customers and better coordinate offers with the various local markets.
Due to the range of functions and Teamviewer’s focus on corporations, all of this can hardly be compared with the figures of the market leader. In the latest quarterly results, Teamviewer had 628,000 subscribers, of which 2,400 were major customers.
Teamviewer boss Oliver Steil even had to address the success of Anydesk at the Capital Market Day last week. The start-up has overtaken the MDax group when it comes to the number of Internet search queries and mobile downloads. Steil emphasized to the analysts that Teamviewer was still clearly ahead in the relevant markets. But in Stuttgart they don’t let that put you off: if the market leader has to talk to analysts about a start-up, that’s a respectable success.
More: Crash of a German stock market star: Why Teamviewer is suddenly a loser.