Industrial companies generate enormous volumes of data every day, and yet much of it remains fragmented across legacy technologies, isolated dashboards, and disconnected site-specific systems. United Manufacturing Hub (UMH) was founded to change that. The Cologne-based company provides an open-source industrial data management platform that unifies heterogeneous IT and OT systems into a single source of truth. With pre-built infrastructure deployable in minutes and no vendor lock-in, UMH enables manufacturers to connect machines, standardize data, and implement high-value use cases significantly faster than building the tech in-house.
When preparing its recent €5 million funding round, UMH wanted to complement institutional investors (such as Compass, Seed and Speed, Archimedes New Ventures, and Sustainable Future Ventures) with carefully selected business angels from Europe and the US, and especially founders who had successfully built open-source software companies themselves.
However, for international angels, investing in a German startup often means navigating a lot of paperwork and cross-border legal requirements; this complexity can quickly discourage participation. To remove these barriers and avoid an overly fragmented cap table, UMH leveraged Roundtable’s SPV structure, enabling business angels to invest digitally while consolidating them into a single, clean cap table entry.
Key takeaways:
- In its latest funding round, UMH raised €5 million to scale its open-source industrial data platform, combining institutional investors with carefully selected business angels who could provide strategic expertise.
- International angels, including Cloudera founder Jeff Hammerbacher, were initially hesitant to take part due to the legal complexity of investing in a German startup. Roundtable enabled UMH to onboard European and US angels through a Luxembourg SPV, removing the administrative friction and making the investment process simple and straightforward.
- By consolidating its angels into a single SPV entry, UMH kept its cap table clean and avoided the legal and operational complexity of managing multiple individual shareholders. The platform provided a smooth onboarding experience for UMH and its angels.
- With the structure in place, UMH can now easily onboard additional angels in future rounds, while focusing fully on scaling its platform and growing its team.
Roundtable: Could you introduce UMH to our readers and explain what the company does?
Niklas Hebborn: UMH is a data platform for industrial companies. Our typical customers operate in production environments, from automotive and food & beverage to broader industrial manufacturing. These companies generate huge amounts of operational data: energy consumption, productivity metrics, quality measurements, machine data, and a lot more.
Our open-source platform provides the data infrastructure that enables them to collect, clean, and standardize all that data. On top of this data layer, we develop specific use cases, such as, for example, reducing energy consumption, increasing productivity, or improving product quality; those are all tailored to the needs of our clients and the complexity of the industrial sector.
Roundtable: What problem are you solving, more specifically?
Niklas Hebborn: Many industrial companies have built individual dashboards for specific use cases: quality monitoring, productivity tracking, energy analysis, and more. But these solutions are rarely scalable. They often work in one site, but cannot be easily expanded across multiple sites, and they often lack a unified data layer.
The core issue is that industrial environments are extremely complex. There are many different protocols, networks, and site-specific requirements. To solve this properly, you need a platform that can handle all that complexity.
Our founders originally worked as consultants, implementing AI-driven productivity improvements on factory floors. That’s when they realized that 90% of their work was simply getting access to usable data; that missing infrastructure layer became the foundation of UMH.
Another limitation we observed in the market is that some competitors provide access to data but stop there. They don’t deliver practical use cases on top of it. We combine both: the data infrastructure and the operational applications like energy optimization or productivity monitoring.
Roundtable: What is your role at UMH?
Niklas Hebborn: I’m the Managing Director. UMH was originally founded by Alexander Krüger and Jeremy Theocharis, both with technical backgrounds. After building and validating the product over several years, they’re now focusing on commercializing and scaling it, which is also the reason I joined them.
Roundtable: Can you tell us about UMH’s most recent funding round?
Niklas Hebborn: Initially, we planned to raise around €2–3 million. But the interest in the round was strong, so we ended up raising approximately €5 million.
Our objective was to build a strong investor base that would be instrumental in supporting UMH’s growth:
- We brought in industrial-focused funds, such as Compass, which have deep expertise in software and hardware combinations and understand industrial environments very well
- We partnered with execution-driven funds with strong go-to-market experience
- And, finally, we wanted to invite a few business angels, for the strategic value they bring
So, we asked ourselves: how can we bring highly experienced and successful software founders from Germany and the US into our round in a structured way that minimizes legal overhead and complex admin work? That’s where Roundtable came in.
Roundtable: Before we discuss the platform, can you tell me what kind of profiles you aimed to bring in as business angels? How did you approach them?
Niklas Hebborn: The angels were selected based on clear criteria.
We looked for people who had built successful software businesses (ideally open-source companies, since our platform is open source) or individuals with strong networks in consulting and industrial customer environments.
It was about strategic fit. We’re very proud to have them on board.
Some of these angels were already in our network and had expressed interest earlier. We contacted others directly (via LinkedIn or email) and built on that.
Roundtable: Where they are from, and how do they support you?
Niklas Hebborn: I’d like to focus on two key angels.
One is Jeff Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera, an open-source company based in the US. We haven’t had extensive discussions with him yet, but his background and experience are extremely valuable for us.
The second is Jan Oberhauser, founder of n8n.io, an AI startup building workflow solutions. We’ve discussed topics such as go-to-market strategy and building a strong product marketing community. Since he’s based in Germany, we have more shared context and touchpoints. We expect to gain a lot of meaningful insights from him, especially on how to build a successful open-source company.
Obviously, we don’t expect our angels to run the company for us, but we deeply appreciate their experience and strategic guidance.
Roundtable: Switching gears, let’s talk about your experience with Roundtable and how it helped you attract business angels. What specific challenges were you looking to solve with Roundtable?
Niklas Hebborn: It started with a very specific problem: how can we bring someone from the States onto our cap table?
Jeff Hammerbacher from Cloudera (based in the US) told us he loved what we were building, but investing in a German company was simply too complicated. Because of that friction, he was initially not interested.
So I started digging deeper. How can we create a structure that allows people outside Germany or Europe to invest easily? Is there a solution that enables us to do that without all the admin (notarized documents, apostilles, etc.)? Is there a digital platform that can simplify and handle all this?
That was the first pain point.
The second issue was cap table complexity. You don’t want to have every individual angel directly on the cap table, because it can become messy very quickly; I’ve seen this before as an investor in other companies. Large cap tables create a lot of extra legal work and administrative overhead. So, having a consolidated structure through an SPV was very important for us.
Roundtable: Considering all this, did Roundtable meet your expectations?
Niklas Hebborn: Yes. For me, it became clear very quickly that this was the right solution; so far, everything has been great. The support we received was very hands-on and the team was extremely helpful.
The investors also liked the experience and had a very smooth onboarding process with the platform. That was really important to us.
Roundtable: Were they familiar with Roundtable?
Niklas Hebborn: Some of the US investors had experience with comparable solutions in the US, so they were used to this kind of setup.
I was happy to see that there were no complaints at all and that everything went very smoothly. That was super important to me; after all, people are transferring money somewhere, so you don’t want anything to go wrong. But we never heard any complaints. It was surprisingly easy.
Roundtable: Before choosing Roundtable, did you consider other options for an SPV platform?
Niklas Hebborn: We considered setting up a legal entity ourselves, but that would’ve been quite complicated.
Roundtable: Can you tell me more about the fundraising process and how you used the platform?
Niklas Hebborn: First, we uploaded all relevant company information – our pitch deck, key funding metrics, and business metrics – in short, everything necessary to give investors a structured overview.
We didn’t use the platform to approach new angels. We already knew who we wanted to bring into the round. The platform helped us consolidate all information in one place and provide a clear overview, without giving full data room access immediately.
Then we followed the standard process: the investors were invited to the platform, committed their funding, and we negotiated the contracts. Once finalized, the relevant documents were shared for signing.
Overall, everything was very straightforward and intuitive.
Roundtable: What would you say are the main operational benefits of using Roundtable?
Niklas Hebborn: The first and biggest benefit is enabling investors from outside Europe to invest easily. That’s the key reason we used the platform.
The second benefit is reducing operational complexity. Having all angels consolidated in one SPV and communicating through a single platform significantly simplified everything. Plus, now that the structure is already set up, we can easily integrate more angels in the future. That’s a major benefit.
Technically, you could also solve the consolidation issue by creating a German legal entity. But the disadvantage is that many international investors don’t want to invest through such structures due to all the admin involved. Roundtable offers a fully digital process, which was key for us.
Roundtable: How was your own experience with the platform? Did it function as you expected?
Niklas Hebborn: It was very good. The platform is simple, intuitive, and user-friendly. The explanations for each step were clear, so you always knew what to do next.
On top of that, the team was amazing in supporting me along the way. They were extremely responsive. I could text or call them whenever something came up. Overall, the package was great.
Roundtable: Would you consider this fundraising round a success? You mentioned that you raised more than initially planned.
Niklas Hebborn: Yes, absolutely. It was extremely successful. We’re very happy. We now have enough capital to do exactly what we planned. The biggest advantage is that we don’t need to worry about fundraising anymore for now; we can fully focus on building the company.
Roundtable: What are the next steps for UMH?
Niklas Hebborn: We’ve already proven that we can be successful on a smaller scale with a few customers and provide them with the data infrastructure they need. Now it’s about scaling that.
That includes scaling our go-to-market – hiring account executives and value engineers to support implementation – but also scaling product and engineering. As you grow your customer base, you receive more feature requests and more load on the product. Ensuring stability and smooth performance at scale is our main focus for the next two to three years.
And of course, hiring is a big part of it. One of the main uses of our capital right now is building the right team.
Roundtable: Would you recommend Roundtable to other startups and founders?
Niklas Hebborn: Definitely. I highly recommend it. I think in the future it will almost be a must. Especially in Germany, where investing can be a huge pain, having such a seamless setup is extremely helpful. I really appreciate how transparent, clear, and easy everything was.
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