Tokenize.it is becoming beel. Same company, same team, same platform, same contracts — over the coming weeks, our website, app, social channels, and documents will move to the new name and our new home at beel.com.
Here's why we're doing it, what the new name means, and what changes for you. The short version of that last part: nothing but the name.
Where we come from
I was a co-developer at Ethereum at the very beginning. Over the years I watched countless token projects come and go, and I came away with one lasting conclusion: tokenization is the right technology for managing company shares and cap tables — above all for fundraising, and for managing investments from business angels to funds.
So we built exactly that: tokenized virtual shares — profit participation rights, or Genussrechte under German law — and started in a deliberate niche: Web3 companies incorporated as GmbHs in Germany. We became the clear number one for security-token fundraising in that niche. But the niche was small, and it was time to grow.
So we opened the platform to all German startups by abstracting away all blockchain related items. Your wallet becomes your account and tokens are just virtual shares. That's where we found product-market fit. Today, more than 100 startups run their fundraising with us, and more than 600 investments have closed on contracts we invested heavily in — legally proven, technically solid.
Why we're changing the name
That success created a problem our name couldn't survive: most of our customers today have nothing to do with crypto. They're startups raising ordinary angel rounds. For them, "Tokenize.it" described the mechanism under the hood, not what they get.
Worse, the name pointed people at the wrong comparisons. Some investors hear "token" and think of technical complexity, or of the ICO era and everything that went wrong with it. Others filed us away as just another crowdfunding platform — which we never were. One founder told me verbatim: "If your name were different, I would immediately raise over your platform."
That sentence settled it. A name sets the frame for what you compare a company with, and ours invited the wrong frame. The honest comparison for what we do was never another token platform. It's the notary appointment. The contract process you repeat for every single investor. The SPV you set up so ten angels fit into one line of the cap table. The overhead of running a fund just to invest together. Those are the things we replace, and the name needed to stop getting in the way of saying so.
To be clear: the technology hasn't gone anywhere. Tokenization still powers the platform, and it's still why we can do things others can't. But the rails are not the product. Nobody chooses a bank for its settlement layer. What our customers get is a round closed in days instead of weeks, and a cap table that stays clean.
What "beel" means
Nothing. On purpose.
beel is a short word with no meaning — yet. That's a feature. A name with baked-in meaning fits what you do today and fights what you do tomorrow; we've lived that once and don't intend to repeat it. beel is easy to pronounce in any language, came with a clean .com and no trademark disputes, and will mean exactly what we make it mean. You can't put us in a category. We create one.
What beel is
beel is the digital execution platform for private startup investments.
We don't try to convince investors to invest in a particular startup. We do the part everyone dreads after the handshake: we execute the deal you've already agreed on.
beel for Founders is how you close your angel round: one process for every investor, whether it's three angels or thirty, no notary bottleneck, no stack of individual contracts to chase.
beel Syndicates is how investors turn dealflow into carry: bring co-investors into a deal, deal-by-deal, without setting up a fund and without a ten-year lock.
Both run on our Virtual Shares — transferable digital shares that also cover employee participation and give investors a sell option down the line, which makes committing to a private investment easier.
Investors notice it on their side of the table too. Thomas Schmidt, Business Angel of the Year 2022, after investing through the platform: "The investment was fast and simple. I did everything digitally and completed the transaction within a few minutes. I recommend it to every investor in my network."
We're live in Germany and Austria, with European expansion planned from 2027. The long-term picture is simple: everything you can do with a cap table — private to public fundraising, employee participation, paying a freelancer in shares, syndicates, one day even running your own fund — should happen in one place. Every deal happens on beel. Every change in your cap table is made real on beel.
What changes for you
Nothing but the name and the domain. Your login works, your contracts are unchanged, and the platform is the same one you used last week. Over the coming weeks we'll switch the website, the app, and our documents over to beel, and tokenize.it will redirect permanently to beel.com — old links keep working.
To the founders who raised on the platform and the investors who backed them: thank you for trusting us with your rounds. You're the reason a niche product became infrastructure. The name is new. What we're building has been the plan all along.
— Christoph
