You can get venture capital in Germany, if you don't need it very much.
Germans know that their country needs venture capital. They worry about it. But they worry still more at the thought that capital might seriously have to be ventured.
Only in the last twelve months have number of venture capital companies begun operations. Even now, banker say at doubt whether the capital will be directed to entrepreneurs who are in the process of establishing new companies.
The latest development is a bill, being discussed in the Bundestag, which will legalise the public issue of shares in holding companies that have stakes in unlisted firms. The idea is that such companies will act as a bridge between private investors and companies that are too small or too young to go public. The new institutions will be called Unternehmensbeteiligungsgesellschaften, which literally means undertakingparticipation companies. (The German noun Unternehmen can mean any sort of business undertaking, but the adjective unternehmerisch means enterprising or entrepreneurial.)
The details of the bill had not yet been finalized last December, when Deutsche Bank and the Bavarian-based Bankgeschaft Karl Schmidt became the first to take advantage of what they assumed its provisions would be.