Moviepilot Sells Its German Business For $20M To Concentrate On The U.S.

Germany’s main film website, moviepilot.de has been acquired by French online publishing company Webedia in a deal which will net Moviepilot €15 million ($20 million) and will now effectively fund its growth as a — now — U.S. based company.

Webedia is rolling up moviepilot.de with Filmstarts, the German subsidiary of French property Allocine. Both brands will continue to operate independently.

Moviepilot’s Tobias Bauckhage, Jon Handschin and Ben Kubota are now in charge of a US site which gets about 40 million impressions a month and operates out of Berlin and Los Angeles.

“The sale of our first start-up, ‘moviepilot.de,’ allows us to press ahead with even more energy and focus on our expansion into the U.S. market with our second start-up, moviepilot.com,” said CEO and co-founder Tobias Bauckhage.

Moviepilot.com’s investors T-Venture of Deutsche Telekom and Grazia Equity as well as IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft and angel investors such as Stefan Glänzer (last.fm) and Riccardo Zacconi (king.com) are now backing it’s Stateside moves.

Bauckhage told me: “We are the only vertical social publisher right now. Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Elitedaily, Policymic are all concentrating on the lowest common denominator content. The German business is highly profitable and financed our US expansion. But now we are ready for the next move.”