Web.de
Web.de was founded in 1995 in Karlsruhe by the brothers Michael and Matthias Greve as an internet directory with 2,500 categorized links to websites. In 1998, the portal introduced its email service, which became its core offering. By the early 2000s, Web.de was one of Germany’s largest internet portals, reaching a significant share of the roughly 8 million German internet users at the time.
The company went public in 2000, at the height of the dot-com era. In 2005, United Internet AG acquired Web.de and integrated it into its applications segment. Today, Web.de together with GMX and Mail.com serves almost 43 million users.