Frank­furt a. M. — The inter­na­tio­nal law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP advi­sed Inven Capi­tal SICAV, a.s. (“INVEN CAPITAL”) on its invest­ment in Forto GmbH. The $50 million funding round led by INVEN CAPITAL also included parti­ci­pa­tion from Iris Capi­tal and exis­ting inves­tors such as Maersk, North­zone, Cherry Ventures, H14 and Rider Global.

Forto GmbH (form­erly Freight­Hub), based in Berlin, is a digi­tal logi­stics service provi­der that enables its custo­mers to digi­tally manage global supply chains from the manu­fac­tu­rer to the end custo­mer. The company now has more than 2,000 custo­mers, inclu­ding compa­nies such as Home24, Miele and Viess­mann. Foun­ded in 2016, the company is growing rapidly and curr­ently employs around 300 people.

INVEN CAPITAL is the venture capi­tal arm of the ČEZ Group, whose invest­ment focus is on invest­ments in clean-tech and new-energy companies.

Weil’s Frank­furt office regu­larly advi­ses INVEN on its invest­ments, inclu­ding the recent finan­cing round at Zolar GmbH, the sale of its stake in home battery storage provi­der sonnen to Shell Over­seas Invest­ment B.V., the invest­ment in start-up Cloud&Heat Tech­no­lo­gies GmbH and the recent finan­cing round at Sunfire GmbH.

The Weil tran­sac­tion team was led by Frank­furt-based Corpo­rate Part­ner Dr. Chris­tian Tapp­ei­ner. He was supported by Coun­sel Konrad v. Buch­waldt and Asso­cia­tes Julian Schwa­ne­beck, Stef­fen Giolda, Sara Afschar-Hamdi, Simon Stei­ner, Mario Kuhn (all Corpo­rate), Mareike Pfeif­fer, Lili­anna Ranody (both Labor Law), Markus Cejka (Finance), Alisa Preiß­ler, Dr. Chris­tian Widera (both Tax) as well as Para­le­gals Nata­scha Späth and Kris­tina Thiel.

Weil, Gotshal & Manges is an inter­na­tio­nal law firm with more than 1,100 lawy­ers, inclu­ding appro­xi­m­ately 300 part­ners. Weil is head­quar­te­red in New York and has offices in Boston, Dallas, Frank­furt, Hong Kong, Hous­ton, London, Miami, Munich, Paris, Beijing, Prince­ton, Shang­hai, Sili­con Valley and Washing­ton, D.C.