PINPOOLS GmbH

PINPOOLS was founded by two brothers who grew up far away from the world of chemistry. Alexander and Heribert-Josef Lakemeyer lived on a farm in Eastern Westphalia with their two brothers and parents until they started their university education. Both pursued their studies in the field of economics and business administration, Alexander in Cologne and Heribert-Josef in Paderborn. Throughout their courses, they gained important practical experience on semesters abroad and during internships, which helped shape their economic expertise.

While still pursuing their diplomas, the two brothers founded their first company. Lakemeyer Extrusion GmbH now is a successful plastics extrusion. Soon after founding the business, they found out how difficult it can be to manually match supply and demand in the ever-growing and digitalizing market, which finally inspired Alexander and Heribert-Josef to develop PINPOOLS. They came up with the idea of creating an independent B2B platform which connects businesses and automatically matches promising partners in the industry.

The development process of PINPOOLS was a challenging but also exciting time. The two brothers had many approaches as to how they could create a platform which would fit the market’s needs, but somehow it was still not what they were looking for. In late 2016, they finally came up with the innovation that would later be known as PINPOOLS. The key aspects were that the purchaser would publish RFQs which would then be responded to by the sales side via auction. During the whole process, PINPOOLS was only to be used as tool, while the direct contact between sales and purchaser remained untouched. The key market was found to be basic chemicals, as these fluctuate in prices and are in high demand, thus making it the perfect good for an online platform. PINPOOLS finally went online in May 2017.

Now, only six months later, PINPOOLS has all major German suppliers for chemicals onboard, new RFQs are coming in every day and the team around the two brothers is steadily growing. While still expanding, it is important for the PINPOOLS team that the platform remains independent, thus guaranteeing a neutral market place for its users.

In the future, PINPOOLS will steadily grow by including more and more suppliers and purchasers. Also, logistics management and relevant information such as force majeure notifications will be integrated into the platform, hence optimizing the purchasing process even further.