Hiking app: Komoot is sold

Komoot is being sold: The Potsdam-based company behind the hiking app of the same name will in future belong to the Italian company Bending Spoons, both parties write in a press release. The companies are not disclosing the financial terms of the takeover.

Komoot co-founder Markus Hallermann sees the sale as necessary for the app's future prospects: "What got us here will not take us to the next level," he writes in the press release. "Scaling a company requires a different mindset and different skills than building a company."

Employees "shocked" according to the report

Bending Spoons is an Italian company that has acquired several well-known applications in recent years, including WeTransfer and Streamyard. Bending Spoons' portfolio also includes Evernote and Meetup. Bending Spoons is sometimes rigorous in its acquisitions: After buying Evernote, the company laid off almost all of its employees. Bending Spoons has also laid off a large part of the workforce in many other acquisitions.

So it's no wonder that the 150 or so Komoot employees are worried , according to Wirtschaftswoche. The employees only found out about the deal on Thursday at an unscheduled meeting. It had already been announced that there would be redundancies. Further inquiries were not permitted, writes Wirtschaftswoche –, adding that the employees were "shocked".

Komoot is an app that provides community-supported tours for hikers, cyclists and runners worldwide. The basic version of the app is free, but if you want to unlock additional features such as tracking and additional planning tools, you have to activate Komoot Premium for 5 euros per month. According to the company, the application, which is available for Android and iOS, has 45 million users. It is not known how many of them are regularly active or even pay for a subscription.

(dahe)