Microsoft acquires Wunderlist maker for between US$100m to US$200m

2 Jun 2015

6Wunderkinder, a Berlin-based start-up responsible for the popular Wunderlist app, has been acquired by Microsoft

Berlin start-up 6Wunderkinder, creator of the popular Wunderlist to-do list app, has been acquired by software giant Microsoft for between US$100m to US$200m.

6Wunderkinder featured in our recent round-up of the top start-ups to watch in Berlin.

Wunderlist is in the vanguard of a new productivity apps movement, which, along with players like Sunrise and Slack, is enabling users and teams to collaborate and organise more easily and efficiently across various devices.

Last year, Microsoft acquired New York-based Sunrise and San Francisco-based Acompli, rebranding the latter as Outlook for Mobile.

Putting on the list

Investors in Wunderlist include Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico, Early Bird in Berlin and New York’s Thrive, and it was the first Berlin start-up to raise funding from Sequoia in California.

During our recent trip to Berlin, the chief design officer at Wunderlist, Benedikt Lehnert, said the core point of Wunderlist is “to help individuals and teams to get stuff done”.

He explained: “We set ourselves a goal of building the producitivity tool that handles all the things in your life. We have transformed the to-do app and turned it into a productivity platform that syncs with whatever you do or use in real-time.”

Lehnert explained that in the average working day around 1.2m to-dos are created by Wunderlist’s user community. In 2014 some 199m to-dos were created and so far a total of 770m to-dos have been created altogether.

The app integrates with tools like Snapchat, OneNote, HipChat, Zapier and Scanbot thanks to a new public API, and the latest app to integrate with Wunderlist is Sunrise.

The Wunderlist can be bought by companies for US$4.99 per seat and around 90,000 teams worldwide use the app.

Wunderlist image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com