German Startup Awards 2021 – Social Entrepreneur of the Year

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Julius is just 20 years old, but already the Social Entrepreneur of the Year

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Media Partnership

This interview is in media partnership with the German startup association (Bundesverband Deutscher Startups https://deutschestartups.org/). Their German Startup Awards (GSA21) honor each year outstanding female and male founders and investors in special categories. You can learn more about the winners in our interview and on our website: https://germanstartupawards.de/

The Founder

In this interview, we talk to Julius de Gruyter (https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliusdg/), who is just 20 years old, but already started a chat version of a crisis hotline called Krisenchat (https://krisenchat.de/), which literally translates to crisis chat. Where people can reach out who need help or someone to talk to, like the crisis hotline, but only for a younger generation (under 25 they state on their website).

Krisenchat came out of a high school project of Julius and friends, called Exclamo an anti-bullying app. Exclamo was developed with the aid of Boston Consulting Groups Digital Ventures (https://www.bcgdv.com/), as well as a funding Deutsche Telekom (https://www.telekom.de). Krisenchat was the reaction of the team to the corona crisis, which wracked their planned launch of Exclamo in March 2020.

Now Krisenchat has approx. 5.000 sessions a month and send or received more than 1 million messages in the last 12 months on their chats. Currently, they are working with 250 volunteers to help aid-seeking teens and tweens.

For Volunteers

Krisenchat could not work without volunteers, if you speak German, consider joining them: https://krisenchat.de/mitmachen