September 16th, 2012

Rocket Internet: Is There A Method To Its Madness Or Is It Just Bad For Innovation

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Editor’s note: Bernard Leong is co-founder of SGE, an online portal dedicated to entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia, and This Week in Asia, a podcast dedicated to tech news in Asia. Follow him at BernardLeong.com or on Twitter: @bleongcw.

A few months ago, I made a point that winter has landed in Southeast Asia with the fast and furious expansion of Rocket Internet, the Germany-based… → Read More

August 30th, 2012

Payleven, The Rocket-Fueled Square-Clone, Opens In UK, Netherlands, Brazil; Confirms Double-Digit Round

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Rocket Internet, the incubator/investment vehicle from the Samwer brothers, is known to move fast: Today, news comes that Payleven, its recently outed Square-clone, has opened its doors in the UK, Netherlands, Poland and Brazil, in addition to its existing operation in native Germany. That looks like the beginnings of a pretty ambitious international expansion plan and will certainly keep European… → Read More

December 15th, 2011

Rocket Misfires — Samwers lose key people ahead of huge fund raising to clone globally

The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the Rocket Internet incubator in Berlin, are the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany and possibly Europe. After launching and exiting multiple businesses, many of them clones/copycats of US startups, they are multi-millionaires. Indeed, their Groupon clone CityDeal sold to to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash… → Read More