Lorenz Bogaert, born 1976, is a Belgian serial Internet entrepreneur. He is co-founder of Massive Media, [1] a social media company owning digital brands such as social networking services Netlog and Ablo and social dating community Twoo. Lorenz lives in Ghent.
Bogaert studied law and management at the universities of Brussels (BE), Fribourg (CH) and Namur (BE).
In 2012 Massive Media was acquired by Meetic, now part of internet holding company IAC. Bogaert is also co-founder of cryptocurrency portfolio application Delta, which was acquired by eToro in 2019 [2] and he was involved in launching expense management scale-up Rydoo, [3] acquired by Sodexo in 2017. [4] Another company founded by Bogaert is proptech scale-up Realo of which he is executive chairman. In 2019 he was listed as the 4th most important angel investor in Belgium by Antwerp Management School. [5]
Bogaert was awarded Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2008. [6]
eToro is an Israeli social trading and multi-asset brokerage company that focuses on providing financial and copy trading services such as forex and crypto. It has registered offices in Cyprus, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. In 2018, the company's value was $800 million which tripled to $2.5 billion in 2020.
Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) service and also provides enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a Belarusian-American entrepreneur, author, speaker, and Internet personality. He is a co-founder of the restaurant reservation software company Resy and Empathy Wines. First known as a wine critic who expanded his family's wine business, Vaynerchuk is now more known for his work in digital marketing and social media as the chairman of New York-based communications company VaynerX, and as CEO of VaynerX subsidiary VaynerMedia.
Netlog was a Belgian social networking service targeted at the global youth demographic. On Netlog, members could create their own web page, meet new people, chat, play games, share videos and post blogs.
Mashable is an international entertainment, culture, tech, science and social good digital media platform, news website and multi-platform media and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005.
Seesmic was a suite of freeware web, mobile, and desktop applications which allowed users to simultaneously manage user accounts for multiple social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Techstars is an American seed accelerator founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. As of 2019, the company had accepted over 1,600 companies into its programs with a combined market capitalization of $18.2bn USD. Fewer than 1% of the over 17,000 applicants are accepted.
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, US that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on multi-stage investments in the enterprise technology, consumer, and health sectors. Over the past two decades, the firm has backed companies such as Snapchat, Affirm, MuleSoft, and AppDynamics.
Greycroft is an American venture capital firm. It manages over $2 billion in capital with investments in companies such as Bird, Bumble, HuffPost, Goop, Scopely, The RealReal, and Venmo. Greycroft was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Dana Settle, and Ian Sigalow. The firm is headquartered in New York City and Los Angeles.
Tech Coast Angels is the leading source of funding to early-stage companies in Southern California. TCA has over 450 members and is also one of the largest angel networks in the world. An analysis by CB Insights ranked TCA #1 out of 370 angel groups on “Network Centrality” and #5 overall in “Investor Mosaic.”
Genesis Partners is an Israeli venture capital firm, founded in 1996 by Eddy Shalev and Dr. Eyal Kishon.
Twoo or Twoo.com is a social discovery platform launched in 2011 by Massive Media. Users create profiles, upload pictures and chat with other users. The website and app is available in 38 languages and counted 181 million users in 200 countries in December 2016.
Match Group, Inc. is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, Ship, and OurTime totalling over 45 global dating companies. The company was owned by parent company IAC and in 2019, the company had 9.283 million subscribers, of which 4.554 million were in North America. Japan is the company's second largest market. In July 2020, Match Group became a separate, public company.
Swiggy is Indian online food ordering and delivery platform. Founded in July 2014, Swiggy is based in Bangalore, and operates in 500 Indian cities, as of September 2021. Apart from food delivery, Swiggy also provides on-demand grocery deliveries under the name Instamart and an instant package delivery service called Swiggy Genie.
ShareChat is an Indian social media and social networking service, developed by Bangalore based Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd. It was founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan, and incorporated on 8 January 2015. ShareChat has over 250 million monthly active users across 15 Indian languages. The company's application offers features that include private messaging, tagging and a personal messaging feature, enabling users to share videos, jokes, songs and other language based social content with other unknown users.
Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. He previously was partner at Social Capital and served as an executive at Yahoo! where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Before that, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and he was CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair.