Interesting Dusseldorf tech companies / startups

Not all German tech is in Berlin. The following list is just based on sampling the news and some Google searching - if something is missing, please let me know. I do, however, not aspire to be complete - I am only going to list things which I find interesting.

Another criterion for inclusion is that there is some (or seems to be) tech development happening in Dusseldorf. So R&D, research and programming qualify, whereas a merely sales-orientied European headquarter (of which there are plenty in Dusseldorf) doesn't count. Sometimes I am not sure, and this will then be mentioned.

Big success stories

• Trivago - majority stake acquired for $632M by Expedia. Easily the biggest German tech buy-out in 2012.
• Qiagen - not really a recent one, but still the only large German biotech company (well, 'large' only by German standards, but still with a market capitalisation of a couple of billion Euros). Slightly strategically troubled by the emergence of 'next-generation' sequencing technologies, of which it now (after acquiring Intelligent Bio-Systems and their sequencing technology) hopes to profit more strongly. Let's see how this goes...

Community

• 1stMOVER - Germany's first incubator focusing on mobile apps and development. Just set up a couple of months ago (as of March 2013), so a bit too early to judge.
• K-LAN - (Co-)working space with an inclination for tech and mobile apps. Home to 1stMOVER, and quite close to the Vodafone Germany campus in Oberkassel.
• GarageBilk - another notable co-working space in another part of town, maybe not so much focused on (rapidly scalable) tech. coworkingloft also gets mentioned, for the nice views.
• Business with Soul -  Community event including talks and drinks. Seems to be nice but never managed to attend one.
• StartupDorf - is going to be an online community for startups in Dusseldorf. At the moment, however, it only offers a map of startups in town.

Aspiring

• Auxmoney.com - consumer-to-consumer lending, apparently the German market leader. Recently closed a $12M round with Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures.
• Evocatel - biocatalysis and custom-made enyzmes. Just completed a round B of EUR 3.5M.
• Rheinfabrik - company behind the reasonably successful time-management app Eisenhower.  One of the founders, Andreas Kwiatkowski, also has an interesting blog.

Interesting novel

• Emmas Enkel - the traditional German corner store ("Tante Emma Laden") beamed into the 21st century, online shop included. I am not at all convinced that this model will work, but I am going to watch quite closely!
• Springlane.de - apparently an online shop / magazine mashup, all about cooking and culinary quality lifestyle. According to the founders, already team of >= 40 people.  
• Just Spices - create your own spice cocktail.

Interesting established

Some established companies, included purely on subjective judgement.

• E.ON Global Commotidies - the energy trading arm of E.ON, once (maybe before the Energiewende) the world's largest invester-held utility (or eletrical utility? People cite multiple slightly different versions of this claim, but E.ON was - and still is - big).
  

The mobile tech cluster
Dusseldorf is home to the (German) headquarters of a substantial fraction of mobile companies  (some of those are actually home-grown - Vodafone Germany was, for example, created from the take-over of Mannesmann of Dusseldorf, which at this point was the second-largest mobile network operator in Germany).

The city markets this under the Mobile Capital brand. The website also has a list of the companies present in Dusseldorf, which I am not going to reproduce here.