Ringier AG has acquired a minority interest in the Berlin start-up BOT Labs, which was founded in January 2018 by Hubert Burda Media together with Ingo Rübe, the former CTO of the national publishing company at Burda. BOT Labs develops blockchain-based technological innovations for companies and offers cooperative models.

Robin Lingg, Head of Marketplaces at Ringier AG, said of the investment: «With the help of BOT Labs, we are aiming to better understand the potential of blockchain technology and to learn how to exploit it for the digital assets in our portfolio. As a digital media company – one that is family owned, like Hubert Burda Media – we need to continue to successfully drive forward Ringier’s digital transformation. In addition to investing in companies, we see investments in enabling technologies as investments into the future of our group».

«Blockchain technology has the disruptive power to eliminate intermediaries. For publishing companies like us, it offers a major opportunity to liberate the connection to our consumers from the clutches of monopolists and to utilise the value created by our content in the digital world for its true purpose: financing high-quality journalism», says Board Member Philipp Welte, who represents Hubert Burda Media as a shareholder of BOT Labs. «We are therefore delighted that with Ringier, another media company with worldwide renown wants to harness the potential of this new enabling technology for its business».

 

Founder and CEO of BOT Labs Ingo Rübe explains: «Our open-source and free protocol allows businesses and public authorities to use blockchain and paves the way for countless new business models in virtually all industries».

 

Blockchain facilitates all kinds of secure transactions, cutting out the middleman. It is a democratic, consumer-friendly and secure technology that has the potential to make all intermediaries redundant and eliminate data misuse and data silos.

Ringier AG, Corporate Communications