Evonik invests in digital platform Chembid
Evonik’s venture capital arm has invested in Chembid, a search and market intelligence platform for chemicals, to strengthen the company’s e-commerce activities.
The start-up, based in Oldenburg, Germany, has developed a meta-search engine that connects buyers with suppliers. Chembid also 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.”
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. Chembid has over 50,000 users a month from more than 150 countries.
Enhancing Chembid’s offerings
Evonik will contribute the knowledge gained from the development and operation of its “OneTwoChem” digital marketplace to Chembid, discontinuing its own platform. Evonik is also enhancing Chembid’s offerings by making its digital laboratory assistant “Coatino” available on the platform.
Chembid was initiated in 2016 by Büfa GmbH & Co. KG. The family-owned company based in Oldenburg, Germany created the platform to accelerate the digitalisation of the chemical industry. The Stockmeier Group has been on board as an investor since 2019.
