Germany’s Lean Ocean raises €800 K to help companies hire using a recruiting game

Germany-based Lean Ocean, a digital agency and HR solution provider, announced on Tuesday, April 4, that it has secured €800.000 in a fresh round of funding for its latest platform, AKEYI Worlds. 

The company says the new platform helps companies attract talent “in a playful way”.

Lean Ocean says that Digital Hub münsterLAND supported them in capital acquisition and helped them be on the ‘big’ stage of INKOM, an investor event of Sparkasse Münsterland Ost.

“We looked for suitable investors and clarified legal and financial questions and created countless presentations, documents and draft contracts.”

“We have found four investors who not only give us the financial energy to scale our platform but also support us with an incredible amount of entrepreneurial know-how and extremely valuable networks,” says the company.

The company’s three new investors include Heinz-Jürgen Buss, Ralph zur Brügge and Johannes Busmann.

Digital agency to HR solution provider

Founded in 2019 by Robert Holtstiege, Lean Ocean started as a digital agency focused on developing web platforms and native apps. Since then, it has simultaneously created SaaS products and, as of the start of 2020, has specialised in providing HR solutions.

The company’s initial focus was on AKEYI Portal, a solution to carry out digital recruiting events for IHKs, HWKs and employment agencies during the pandemic. To date, it has been implemented in over 160 of these events.

“We not only provided our customers with the technical platform, but we also trained over 6,000 participating companies in how to use our software and provided them with our support Team available for questions,” says the company.

This helped the company to find itself in the thick of hiring and, via several conversations, learned firsthand about the difficulties faced by German HR departments. According to Lean Ocean, future demographic shifts will make this problem considerably worse. 

“Due to demographic change, we will be missing another 3.9 million skilled workers and junior staff in Germany by 2030. And therefore it is not surprising that more than 50 per cent of German companies see the greatest danger to their business development in the lack of skilled workers.”

This is what Lean Ocean is looking to fix with AKEYI Worlds. “We got the chance to present our concept to over 100 large companies (1,000+ employees) and to identify a real need.”

“Over 90 per cent of the HR departments interviewed gave our solution a high to very high value and over 30 per cent were so enthusiastic that they supported us directly in the development of our solution,” says the company.

Two well-known companies, Targobank and Sparkasse Münsterland Ost, immediately agreed to become Lean Ocean’s first paying pilot customers.

Capital utilisation

With the raised capital, the German company says it will accelerate the development of its technology and strengthen its sales and marketing activities.

“There are a lot of companies that we can support with our recruiting games. So all signs point to growth.”