As the economy has gotten tougher, plenty of companies have switched to buying in assets to renting them. There’s a tortuous acronym for this which is XaaS or “Everything-as-a-Service”, also referred to as “Servitization”. An example of this would be ServiceNow which automates services for enterprise operations.

A new-ish player in this space is Equipme, out of Germany, which bills itself in this XaaS manner.

It’s now secured $3.8M in a seed investment round led by La Famiglia VC, out of Berlin, the €250M fund raise for which we covered just last month.

Other investors include Lightbird, Anamcara and Angels including Ignaz Forstmeier, co-Founder at Personio, and Charlie Songhurst, former Head of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft.

Equipme has a B2B marketplace and asset management portal which – it says – enables suppliers to offer their products and services in this XaaS manner. In other words, companies invite their existing service-providers onto it and then make their services available via this self-service model.

In a statement, Paul Martin, Co-Founder and CEO of Equipme said: “For instance, Equipme simplifies the process of equipping employees during the onboarding process, by seamlessly integrating all relevant parties and suppliers, including the employees itself to select their preferred devices and tools. Subsequently, Equipme takes care of managing inventory, subscriptions, and related costs throughout the entire lifecycle in one central place.”

Equipme says it is in use by 500 customers, largely in the DACH region, but plans to expand globally. The company was founded in November 2021 by Alexandre Seifert and Paul Martin with its headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Judith Dada, Partner at La Famiglia added: “Decision-makers value cost efficiency and flexibility most. This is why Software as a Service has been so successful in recent years.”

Germany’s XaaS platform Equipme secures $3.8M Seed led by La Famiglia VC by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch