Happy Birthday Matmatch: Celebrating One Year in Business

Our journey started on September 20th 2017 – one year ago – with a daring idea that grew into the creation of the company. Our CEO Melissa Albeck and COO Heiko Wildner, together with BCG DV, set up an ambitious project that we hope will ultimately transform the traditional materials industry for a digital future.

Our vision: “We want to inspire people to build better products by changing the way the world discovers and uses materials”

Having this vision in mind, we hired a team of materials scientists that started working on collecting data for our materials database. They started from scratch, but looking back we can say it was a massive achievement because now we have more than 82,000 materials on the platform…and counting.

Since the very beginning, we followed a tight schedule, set challenging KPIs, and kept moving closer to achieving our goals. In just one year our team tripled in size and now we are twenty-nine people from eighteen different countries – a very unique selection of talents, skills and experiences. Here at Matmatch, we celebrate this diversity because it fosters innovation and creativity. And we’re constantly learning from each other.

The Matmatch database has been growing fast as well. More and more engineers, product designers, materials scientists and procurement teams have been finding out about us and using the platform. We collected lots of feedback, contacted people who have used Matmatch, asked questions and listened to their problems. Our Head of Product Marcus Wiberg and his team have done a great job addressing their needs and making the platform user-friendly and clean. Our efforts paid off with an impressive growth.

Very soon, Matmatch appeared in the media, including industry-leading publications. We started to receive lots of attention and were invited to give speeches and share our mission with wider audiences. Our Head of Growth Ben Smye and the marketing team spread the Matmatch message to a global audience and help more people discover us.

We are happy to announce that world-known material suppliers such as Plansee, thyssenkrupp, GoodFellow, SCHOTT, Hydro and many others are convinced enough by Matmatch to list their materials on our platform. We look forward to strengthening these relationships in the next year and building new ones too.

Of course, our impressive growth is hugely supported by the software development team. Much of , work is behind the scenes, but it is – of course – vital. They’ve built up a backend infrastructure to support our growing user base and made the Product team’s vision a reality on the frontend. Many thanks to our Head of Engineering Christian Uhl and his agile team who organised workshops, cross-functional teams and mob programming sessions.

“I am really proud of how far we have come in our first year at Matmatch. It is never easy to bring about change in a traditional industry like we are aiming to in the materials space, but we have succeeded in attracting over 110,000 monthly active users and enabled many of them to get in touch directly with suppliers of the materials they need for their projects,” says Melissa Albeck, CEO.

“More and more materials suppliers are seeing the value of being listed on our site and raising awareness of their products. In the meantime we have a great team here in Munich with all the skills we need to grow and we look forward to continuing on our mission to make Matmatch the go-to-place for materials in the coming year!”

Matmatch would like to express its thanks to our great clients, partners, colleagues and friends as we celebrate the completion of our first year in business. Your support was exceptional! With your help, Matmatch is becoming the world’s biggest online materials search engine. We are looking forward to the upcoming year and more successes. Thanks for being a part of the journey!

Keep an eye on this blog and on our LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter pages for updates!