Berlin incubator Team Europe enters Korea by starting food ordering service Yogiyo

A version of this article first appeared on beSUCCESS.

Berlin-based Team Europe starts several new companies every year together with investors, and a venture-focused HR service provider, with support from industry networks.

The company provides accumulated experience and specialist knowledge to the management teams of newly launching businesses, allowing for faster-than-average expansion cycles. Team Europe recently expanded to Asia, setting up their first presence in South Korea.

But they are not new to Asia. Venture partner Markus Fuhrman had started several companies in China before joining Lukasz Gadowski, Kolja Hebenstreit and Steffen Höllinger at Team Europe in 2009. One of their portfolio companies, Sponsorpay already has an office in Tokyo.

In Korea, Team Europe will launch their online food ordering service Delivery Hero , under the local brand “Yogiyo” (a Korean word-play of the verb “to eat” and “waiter here please”).

The incubator has appointed Ludolf Ebner-Chung as the CEO of Team Europe Asia Pacific. He will simultaneously act as the CEO of Yogiyo together with Jewon Na as COO, Angela Park as CMO, Victor Ching as CPO and Christoph Mayr as venture partner.

I caught up with Ludolf to learn more about their move to Asia and plans for South Korea.

What was the motivation behind launching in Asia-Korea?

Asia especially Korea is one of the most dynamic regions in the world. We are starting with Korea, because Korea offers an excellent combination of internet and mobile-phone infrastructure, successful internet companies and a great talent pool.

We think that it is a great opportunity to join these forces and create value. If you look at Korea there were many cases of really early-stage successful companies, but they couldn’t drive up their businesses as other companies like in the US for example.

Take Cyworld, they started much before Facebook and had a great success in Korea. Now Facebook did their IPO a couple of weeks ago with a US$100B valuation. Compared to that, Cyworld is not doing that great anymore. There are other examples like likeschool.com or also Kakaotalk that is doing very well now and we are very curious to see how they will grow.

We think that we can provide value in this setting with our experience in various online commerce sectors. We have a great database of entrepreneurs and successful internet-company managers, broad online marketing experiences and access to various relevant industry networks.