Berlin Startups Continue Consolidation, As Moped Crashes Into 6Wunderkinder

Back in the Summer we saw the first signs of Berlin’s startup hot-house begin to consolidate. Amen has been the most high-profile company to throw in the towel and merge with a fellow Berlin startup, after an almost Herculean effort to get acquired by a big US company.

Others, like the Toast app and Gidsy also withered or were acquired (in Gidsy’s case). The latest is Moped, a messaging startup which was somewhat ahead of its time, prior to the explosion of similar such apps in the latter part of this year. On Moped, private messaging with the same useful hashtags you find on Twitter was integrated with Dropbox. Later it pivoted into the enterprise space with a product for teams.

Founder Schuyler Deerman has confirmed to users in an email that Moped had been acquired by 6Wunderkinder, the makers of Wunderlist and would be shutting down on December 31st. After that Moped will no longer be available. All Moped users are eligible for a free month of Wunderlist Pro, which lets you have conversations inside their to do app. He declined to comment further. 6Wunderkinder – which raised $19M in a Series B funding this month – has in turn confirmed that the acquisition was for the messaging technology only, and no Moped staff will be joining.

The move is probably a good one, since Wunderlist Pro is all about teams, so in theory the Moped tech will come in handy.

Moped had previously raised $1 million from SV Angel (Ron Conway), Lerer Ventures, Betaworks and Earlybird Capital.

Only last Summer Moped was continuing to iterate its product, allowing users to sign up within LinkedIn and saying that it was going after the “sweet spot” of sharing files over messaging.