You open Jodel on a Tuesday afternoon in a university cafeteria in Cologne, and the first post is a complaint about the pasta. The second is a question about a statistics exam. The third is someone, anonymous, asking if it is normal to feel lonely in your second semester. There is no profile picture to click, no follower count to weigh, no algorithm reaching across continents to recommend a stranger's grievance. The feed is just the people inside roughly ten kilometers of where you are standing, sorted by what the room found interesting in the last few hours. It is a small, strange, almost municipal experience of the internet, and it is the bet Alessio Avellan Borgmeyer has been making for more than a decade.
Jodel, founded in Berlin in 2014, is an anonymous, location-based messaging app that connects users with people in the same physical area [Dealroom.co]. Posts, photos, and short videos are visible to whoever is nearby, and the community votes them up or down in real time [Crunchbase]. There is no persistent identity to build, no influencer economy to climb. The wedge has always been students: a freshman walks onto a German university campus, opens the app, and instantly drops into a feed populated almost entirely by classmates they have not met yet. That product loop, simple as it sounds, is what turned Jodel into a fixture of German campus life and earned it a Series A.
The bet
The company raised $6.76 million in a Series A in April 2017, led by the U.S. firm Floodgate, with participation from Kima Ventures and Quora co-founder Adam D'Angelo as an angel [Crunchbase, April 2017] [Tracxn]. Earlier pre-seed and seed rounds in 2014 set the foundation [Crunchbase]. The cap table is interesting on its face: a Berlin consumer-social company that pulled in a Silicon Valley seed-stage firm best known for backing Twitter and Lyft, alongside a founder, D'Angelo, who has spent his career thinking about how strangers talk to each other online.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Pre-Seed 2014 | 0 $M disclosed |
| Seed 2014 | 0 $M disclosed |
| Series A 2017 | 6.76 $M |
The strategy has been narrow on purpose. Rather than chase global virality, Jodel has concentrated on dense, geographically bounded communities where a critical mass of users within a few square kilometers makes the feed feel alive. Universities are the obvious fit, and German-speaking Europe has been the home market. The product itself has barely changed in shape since launch: a vertical feed, color-coded threads, upvotes and downvotes, and karma points that exist only inside the app. The typography is friendly, the onboarding asks for almost nothing, and the absence of a username is treated as a feature rather than a gap to fill.
Why it could still be big
The cultural backdrop has, in some ways, moved toward Jodel rather than away from it. The collapse of the original Yik Yak in 2017 and the uneven second life of anonymous apps have left a vacuum on Western campuses, even as students continue to want spaces that are not indexed by recruiters, parents, or future employers. Group chats on Discord, Telegram, and WhatsApp absorb some of that demand, but they require an invitation and a known social graph. Jodel's pitch, that you can walk into a room and immediately hear what the room is saying, is still genuinely distinct. For a generation that has grown wary of permanent digital identity, an app where nothing you say follows you to your next job interview is not a small proposition.
The investor signal matters here. Floodgate's willingness to lead a Series A in a Berlin consumer-social company, an unusual geography for the firm, suggests the partners saw something in the engagement data that justified the bet [Tracxn]. D'Angelo's involvement is its own kind of endorsement: Quora was, in its early years, an experiment in how identity and quality interact in user-generated content, and an angel check into an anonymous network from that founder is a deliberate choice.
The team
Avellan Borgmeyer, who studied at RWTH Aachen and has been the public face of the company since founding, remains chief executive [Crunchbase]. He has spoken in German-language interviews and podcasts about building Jodel as a hyperlocal community product rather than a broadcast platform [Studicast]. Tim Schmitz is listed as a co-founder. The company has been based in Berlin throughout, and infrastructure partner Leaseweb has publicly described Jodel as a Berlin social media startup running on its network [Leaseweb]. The company's own marketing language continues to describe Jodel as "the hyperlocal community" [Jodel].
The honest counterfactual
The bear case on Jodel is the bear case on every anonymous social product: moderation is expensive, harassment is hard to police without identity, and regulators in Europe have grown less patient with platforms that cannot reliably trace abusive content. Yik Yak's first incarnation died in part because it could not solve that problem on American high school and college campuses. The bull answer, and it is a real one, is that Jodel's hyperlocal design actually narrows the moderation surface: a feed bounded by ten kilometers in a German university town is a very different content environment than a national or global anonymous network, and community downvoting in a small group of nearby users tends to bury the worst posts faster than it would in a sprawling feed. Whether that holds at scale, and under the EU's evolving Digital Services Act obligations, is the open question.
What to watch
The next twelve months are about whether Jodel can show a credible second act beyond its German campus heartland. Watch for any expansion announcement into adjacent European markets, any product moves that adjust the balance between anonymity and accountability, and any new funding round that would signal Floodgate and Kima are ready to write follow-on checks more than eight years after the Series A. The team has been notably quiet in English-language press, and a renewed communications push would itself be a tell.
The cultural question Jodel is implicitly answering is the one the rest of the consumer internet has spent a decade trying to avoid: what does a social network look like when it refuses to know who you are, and only cares where you are standing?