Jan Mechtel is the Founder and Managing Director of Veodin, a graduate company of the Founder Institute Berlin chapter. Mechtel’s German startup Veodin was recently acquired by Templafy, a larger Danish company that builds document automation and template editing tools that work to safeguard corporate brand assets and streamline communication best practices while saving enterprise businesses time and effort.
Veodin itself is a software engineering company, and was founded by Jan Mechtel in 2010 to build document creation productivity software. Veodin’s product offerings include the popular SlideProof tool, a plugin for Microsoft PowerPoint designed to save managers and professionals from tiresome time spent tweaking and reformatting the visual elements of their slide decks and presentations. Veodin is also the creator of the KeyRocket tool, an application that teaches keyboard shortcuts in the name of productivity.
Mechtel arrived to the startup world from an earlier career in management consulting and finance, having worked previously at Merrill Lynch and McKinsey. This glimpse into the world of corporate finance and consulting that gave Mechtel some direct insight into the amount of time that management and financial analysts often spend battling against small quirks of the Microsoft Office product suite. He founded Veodin in part to help solve the issue of minor tweaks adding up to major time spent, by creating tools that automate away some of the more tedious aspects of document editing.
The PowerPoint add-in Slideproof, specifically, was a very strategic acquisition on the part of Templafy, which will absorb the software tool as a complementary addition to the company’s overall enterprise communications productivity and governance platform. The merger will mean a more streamlined experience for both companies’ existing customers, as well as a more robust platform of product offerings moving forward together into the future. According to Mechtel,
Templafy is the perfect match for us and SlideProof. Templafy is extremely fast at building a strong enterprise customer base and joining forces allows us to focus on what we do best: boosting productivity for knowledge workers around the globe.
With the recent acquisition, what was formerly Veodin will now serve as Templafy’s new Berlin office. Along with the rest of his talented team, Mechtel will remain onboard following the merger, and will now serve as the Managing Director of Templafy’s new German entity. Templafy is growing quickly, and earlier this year (prior to the acquisition) secured $17.2M in a Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners. According to Templafy's CEO, Jesper Theill Eriksen:
Adding Veodin's popular SlideProof tool for PowerPoint to Templafy's enterprise communication productivity platform improves the overall productivity offering for enterprise customers around the globe. With Templafy's new Berlin office, we also look forward to better serving our German customers with the help from our new colleagues as we expand in that region.
Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over $1.85BN in funding, and building products people love across over 200 cities worldwide.
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