WESt mbH — Wirtschaftsförderungs- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft Steinfurt mbH — is the official economic-development agency of Kreis Steinfurt, the rural district in northwestern North Rhine-Westphalia that includes Ibbenbüren. Founded in 2000, sole shareholder is the Beteiligungsgesellschaft des Kreises Steinfurt mbH (a county subsidiary), and the agency celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2025.
WESt's Gründungsgeschichten (founder stories) editorial series profiles startups and growth-stage companies founded with WESt's involvement or anchored in Kreis Steinfurt. ThreeB IT is in that series — coverage at westmbh.de/tag/threeb-it and on the dedicated article "ThreeB IT: In der Gegenwart für die Zukunft — Digitalisierung im Unternehmen."
The profile
Per the published positioning: ThreeB IT was founded in 2019 by Thimo Buchheister and Thorsten Brügge as software engineers wanting "to make the world of digital processes accessible to everyone."
The published profile names:
- Customer focus: medium-sized and large companies, especially industry and retail
- Capabilities: digitalisation of business processes, training, and automation for efficiency and security
- Partner network: Vodafone Uplift, Bitkom's Get-Started programme, and WESt itself
That third bullet is worth noticing: WESt is itself part of the partner network it's writing about — which is the regional-development model working as designed. The agency invests in startups, helps them succeed, then writes them up so the next cohort of founders can see the pattern.
Why a county-level founder profile matters
Three reasons it punches above the press-release weight class:
Fibre infrastructure. WESt is also the organisation that drove the FTTH rollout that pushed Kreis Steinfurt above 95% fibre coverage before remote work became standard. That non-obvious infrastructure decision is the reason a software house can credibly operate from Ibbenbüren in the first place. Being profiled in the series is, indirectly, an acknowledgement that the broadband bet paid off.
The STARTERCENTER NRW certification. WESt is a state-certified STARTERCENTER NRW, which means the founder-advisory work it does has standing across the whole state. Inclusion in Gründungsgeschichten is reputational weight from a body that other agencies trust.
University-industry brokering. WESt co-founded TRAIN with FH Münster in 2001 — a knowledge-transfer organisation that fed engineering talent into Münsterland companies for two decades. Being on WESt's radar means being on the receiving end of those introductions.
How this fits
WESt's Gründungsgeschichten sits alongside the Gründen.nrw podcast profile in the regional-recognition stack. Both are funded by public agencies whose explicit job is to grow the local startup ecosystem. Both selected ThreeB IT because the regional infrastructure worked: a fibre line in Ibbenbüren, a STARTERCENTER advisory in Steinfurt, a federal funder in Düsseldorf, and a Mittelstand-software house in between.
That's the basic ThreeB IT origin story, told from the agencies' point of view rather than ours. The full WESt article — link below — fills in the colour.
Read it
- WESt profile / tag page: westmbh.de/tag/threeb-it
- The agency itself: westmbh.de
- Münsterland context: muensterland.com — Economic Development Steinfurt District