Churchdesk – Øresund Startups

Kenneth Svenningsen becomes the new product manager of ChurchDesk

Mathias Tinghøj Hansen — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 07:36:54 +0000

The Copenhagen-based startup, ChurchDesk have recently hired Kenneth Svenningsen to be their new Product Manager. ChurchDesk’s ambition is to become the primary partner of the church. They stress the importance of a close collaboration so that the platform is formed to mirror the actual needs of the institution. As the connection point between the church and ChurchDesk, Kenneth will be responsible for keeping the dialog open while continuously improving on the existing product.

ChurchDesk was founded in 2010 with the goal of giving the church new tools to work with in the digital world. The platform is an all-in-one solution that lets priests and other church administrators communicate with their congregation while keeping taps on administrative work such as donations, volunteer planning, and updating their calendar.

Today ChurchDesk have offices in Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, and London and the startup have received significant investments from both Accelerace and Mangrove Capital Partners.

Experience and Courage

Kenneth Svenningsen brings extensive experience from his previous positions as CEO of Shipbeat, CTO of Miinto, and as Product Manager at Rocket Internet. While running Shipbeat, Kenneth was engaged in easing the burden of shipping for e-commerce companies. His previous efforts to streamline logistics is seen as a big advantage when trying to simplify the complexities of the church institution.

Christian Steffensen, the Founder and CEO of ChurchDesk writes that he is excited to work with Kenneth as he understands the needs and possibilities of working digitally.

“Kenneth has choosen ChurchDesk because we have the courage to work outside of the “comfort zone” when trying to make a difference and create a company on a solid foundation. I am convinced that Kenneth will contribute greatly to this goal,” writes Christian Steffensen.

With the size and support for the startup, Christian sees it as a natural step to hire an experienced Product Manager to take care of the continued communication and development.

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Churchdesk continues growing

Iryna — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:17:11 +0000

Churchdesk, Danish cloud-based management platform for churches, continues growing. In their recent blog post, the startup summed up some exciting events that were taking place in the company over the past couple of month. Among the achievements of the past year are a large investment, opening of a new office and expansion of the team.

The investment during 2015 of € 2 million (1.5 million pounds) came from Mangrove Partners, who have extensive experience in building successful international IT companies such as Skype. This investment brings the ability to take Churchdesk’s core product to the next level. For example, during 2015 Churchdesk has introduced an improvement to their service by adding church database tool called “People”. The database if fully customisable and offers the opportunity to segment the congregation for more targeted communication with the church.

The funding also makes it possible for Churchdesk to hire in strong, experienced staff, much needed in relation with the company’s constant expanssion. Since its launch in 2013 Churchdesk has already established presence in Germany, and in 2015 followed an opening of a new office in London.

“Our customer numbers continue to grow in the UK and our new office will give us more resources to cater to this rapidly expanding market. We currently enjoy close co-operation with over 1000 churches and our solution is helping to optimize and modernize the work of our members,” shared in the blog.

To manage the new location as well as strengthen the positions in the current market, Churchdesk has also extended its team. Three new country managers Elliot Robinson, previously of Zendesk, Yann-Frédéric Meyer-Ciolek, previously of Yelp, and Daniel Massot, previously of HP, Dell and Arrow, will work with the UK, German and Nordic markets respectively.

As for the start of 2016, the company already has some interesting updates lined up that are to be revieled in Q1 and Q2.

Update: The investment was during 2015, and is not new, but something we had not highlighted before.

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Startup Village officially opened – #svlaunch

Karsten Deppert — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 08:04:25 +0000

On Friday, the official opening of the Startup Village Copenhagen took place. Startup Village has been in the talks since before the summer, and most startups have actually already moved in, with the aid of companies like moving and storage nyc, during the summer. But last week was the official opening. So these top-rated professional packers here have also helped a lot!

Above you can see the some footage of the opening ceremony, where Zenia Francker from Founders House held the inauguration talk.

Founders house is a initiative where some of the most successful startups from Copenhagen have co-located in the same block. Startup Village is located at Islands Brygge on Njalsgade, in the old pakhusen. Some of the startups have had their offices there for a while already, but with the latest startups moving there the idea of branding it as Startup Village was born.

The houses are 4 old warehouses remodeled by a local floor marking contractor, with some startups having smaller spaces and some entire floors. It is a distinct historical area with great flavour and both indoor as well as outdoor locations.

Entrepreneurial initiative

Behind the initiative are the different startups, with Founders House moving there being one of the driving factors. It is a completly private initiative, with the aim of helping all startups located in the village. Somewhat ironically, the business department of the Copenhagen Municipallity actually had their offices just next door, until they moved to a new location, this summer.

Startups present

Some of the biggest startups present in the Startup Village are:

With the Founders House co-working space there are also a larger number of smaller and newer startups present.

Not just startups

The village also includes a café and a restaurant, as well as a Yoga center. Some ‘regular’ companies are present on the premises as well, such as White Arcitects office, as the this has rather been a gradual growing conglomeration of startups and not a top-down planned takeover, such as Berlin Factory. The idea is however to enable further startups to move there, with the assistance of a service like business moving services, as soon as floor-space becomes available.

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Geist: Experienced entrepreneurs give 10 rules to the government

Karsten Deppert — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 09:55:16 +0000

A new initiative to help more startups reach international success has been announced. The program, initiated by the Danish government, has support by some of the most successful recent startups. Called Geist, the entrepreneurs have given the Danish authorities 10 recommendations which should enable them to better help startups. The aim is that more startups expand internationally.

The entrepreneurs participating in Geist consist of nine respected and successful startups:

Together they come up with 10 recommendations to the government officials to enable a growing success of the Danish National IT and tech startups, and the result is also indirectly an evaluation of public actions aimed at entrepreneurs.

The 10 recommendations are both harsh as well as open-minded. It contains some solid tips such as #1 “remove the brand”, which emphasises that public run initiatives are looked down upon in the community, and it might be better to ‘hide’ that they are government run, and put entrepreneurs in the front. Other advices are such as #5 “Join us!”, that the public officials need to be present at meet ups and co-working spaces, and should not expect entrepreneurs to come to them if they want help. They need to build a relationship with them.

It also contains some more controversial, such as #3 “spoil the elite”, which argues that by helping the ones with the largest ambitions thru special services will enable better business development, instead of treating a freelancer in the same way as a ‘born global’ startup.

You can find all 10 advices here.

Update: Due to popular demand we have translated the rules to English. They can be found here.

“Geist is public run, and there a lot of public projects launched, and Geist is a kind of evaluation of them. It is a good idea, it is thought-thru. Instead of putting officials in an office this gets a dialogue with entrepreneurs.” says Christian Steffensen from Kirkeweb to Trendsonline.

Trendsonline has a longer article with both Christian Steffensen and Søren Halskov Nissen and their thoughts.

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Copenhagen Startup Village revealed!

Karsten Deppert — Fri, 23 May 2014 09:26:19 +0000

There really is something brewing in Copenhagen! Founders House, an invite only co-working space, has for long been the most known startup palces in Copenhagen. This week it was announced they will move to a new location. But this location will not just be a much larger and grander Founders House – it will also be next to a lot of other prominent startups!

The new location, at Islands Brygge, will thus form a new innovative tech hub – dubbed the Startup Village Copenhagen.

Old warehouses turned into startups heaven

Islands Brygge’s historic warehouses marked by experts you can aslo hire if you click here used to be the headquarters of FDB, who stored and transported products to all of Denmark via direct tracks to Copenhagen Harbor. In recent years, the area has increasingly become the home of tech startups, and now that is accelerated. As of this summer, the area in Njalsgade will be the frame around Copenhagen’s biggest concentration of fast-growing startups, including the estabished startups Vivino, Opbeat, Graduateland and Autobutler, as well as over 15 other both early and later stage startups!

A real hub for startups

Having all these ambitious startups with offices side by side increase knowledge-sharing and in turn speeds up growth of the individual companies. All serious tech startups are welcome, both to take up offices at Njalsgade, now called Startup Village, and to join the many tech events and social stuff arranged so people can network, do business and have fun. Founders House will with it’s move also expand, so talk to them if you are a smaller startup and want to be part of their co-working area.

A grass-roots initiative

The entire idea behind the Startup Village comes from the community itself. In contrast to many other projects, this is not a government sponsored place or initiative, but rater it is the different startups realizing that they could create an area that they would love themselves. This is a similar trend seen elsewhere, with Berlins Factory (also to be opened this summer) being a similar initiative.

With both the established startups being there, and Founders House with its often earlier stage startups as well as smaller startups in their own offices, the Village will be a space for both startups that are just getting going, as well as later stage ones that have raised a successful series A or even a series B investment. The Village will also be a natural place for international startups establishing a Scandinavian presence to be located – something that already is apperent on the list of the initial startups forming the Startup Village!

All in all, a great step for the community to have that much knowledge in one place!

Startups present

The spaces are being put in shape now, and the inaugurations is set for the 29th of August. The following startups have said will be part of the Startup Village CPH when it starts:

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TechBBQ final count down: celebration of Danish tech startup community is less than a week away

Iryna — Thu, 15 May 2014 12:16:22 +0000

TechBBQ will take place in less than a week and there is still some time left to get the tickets. This year’s TechBBQ will primarily serve as a confidence booster for the Danish startup community, focusing on what is special – for better or worse – about being a startup based in Denmark. The vision for the event is to unite, strengthen and showcase Danish tech startup community domestically and internationally, so many guests from the neighboring regions are expected.

Here are the people you should know:

Esben Gadsbøll: entrepreneur and time captain. Co-founder of among other things the Danish startup White Away and Danish Pretotyping.dk.
Klaus Nyengaard: entrepreneur, investor and board member. Involved in Danish startups such as GenieBelt, Sekoia, Kirkeweb, SmartGuy and Language Wire. He is also the former Group CEO of Just-Eat.
Martin Bjergegaard: entrepreneur and author. Co -founder of startup factory Rainmaking and co-founder of Frokost.dk, StartupBootcamp, BetterNow and Pine Tribe.
Daniel Laursen: entrepreneur and visionary enthusiast. Founder of the news media TrendsOnline, ShopsOnline and NordicStartupBits, and other entrepreneurial support projects and organizations.

More information about the event and tickets are available at the TrendsOnline website.

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KirkeWeb appoints a new board to secure its internationalization strategy

Iryna — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 10:13:08 +0000

KirkeWeb, Denmark’s leading platform for managing church workflow, has appointed a new board that includes former CEO of Just-Eat Klaus Nyengaard. The hope is that stepping in as a chairman of the KirkeWeb Klaus Nyengaard will lead the company from entrepreneurial stage to international success story. At the moment the ambition is to capture German market during the upcoming fall with follow up deployment in England and other European countries in 2014.

“We have long been going through a growth stage marked by the Danish sales and we always knew that we were going abroad. Over the past few months we have gotten some customers in Germany and at the same time our sales have reached breakeven point. Now we know that there is a market we can bring value to,” says Christian Steffensen, CEO and founder of KirkeWeb to Trendsonline.dk

According to Klaus Nyengaard KirkeWeb has a huge international potential and up 95% of sales could be picked up abroad. The work on internationalization will be supported by other board members Troels Falkenberg and Christian Hoffmann.

Christian Steffensen started KirkeWeb in 2009 while being a student. His mother, a pastor, missed some essential communication tools with the parish and he addressed this need by developing a website for a few churches. It soon became obvious that there was a vast array of unaddressed needs within the church communities.

Since 2009 KirkerWeb has grown. It now has 18 employees and is working to develop web solution for over 200 churches in Denmark and Germany. The uniqueness of KirkeWeb is that it helps churches to improve both external and internal communication and gives people a much simpler tool to engage in church activities.

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KirkeWeb recieves €400K funding and goes international

Karsten Deppert — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 20:01:09 +0000

KirkeWeb, a company specializing in administration tools for churches, has just recieved 3M kroner (€400K) in funding through Accelerace. With the funding they plan on going into the German marked – a marked far larger then the current domnestic one, and a first step towards an international company.

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