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April 27, 2006
Banexi Backs An Interactive TV Rollup
Banexi Ventures in Paris is backing a low-budget rollup of interactive video and TV startups by the founders of Pulsevision, now called Kewego. The startup announced raising €5M in a second round from Banexi Ventures this week, the acquisiton of one year old Pooxi.com, a French video sharing and aggregator, and in the process it changed its name to Kewego (via Kelblog).
Pulsevision was founded in 2003 by Michel Meyer and Olivier Heckmann, two of the five founders of Multimania which was acquired by Lycos in a deal worth some €220M during the dotcom bubble. It started out developing text messaging applications for interacting with TV broadcasts and channels in France -- the same kind of applications as RedLynx in Finland and 2Way Traffic in Netherlands offer.
It then acquired Tedisys, a developer of digital real-time displays used for advertising and information dissemination. If you live in Europe, you've seen these large plasma or LCD screens delivering ads, info, or promotions at airports, kiosks, and post offices. It's a highly fragmented market, with two or three leading suppliers in each country.
Now it has acquired Pooxi, which aggregates videos across a wide range of topics, for an undisclosed amount. Pooxi is one of three video sharing sites in France. The others are DailyMotion and vpod.tv. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Pooxi founded in January 2005 was the oldest, we believe.
We like the ambitious nature of Kewego.
The funding will help KEWEGO acquiring leadership in the Video, Broadcast and TV Industry and developing the next generation of products and services around the concept of TV 2.0.
It's targeting a market slated for quick growth, but it's a highly fragmented market both on the product side and on the supplier side. We believe a consolidation strategy would have plenty of potential targets and the prices are still reasonable, which should give Kewego a chance to carve out a leading place in the European interactive TV market.
You may recall that the same VC backed Kelkoo, which was acquired by Yahoo two years ago for a princely sum after building up a successful Pan European online business. (This might explain why the letters "K" and "o" are being re-used here. If you want to know more about the story of Kelkoo, it has been written up in a book by Julien Codorniou containing interesting insight into the people behind the success story.)
We know that Banexi has a flair for building Pan European ventures and finding good exits - it is one of a handful of venture funds in Europe to not only raise a new fund in the last year, but also to have more money coming at it from LPs in the US and Europe than what it targetted.
We've interviewed Michel Dahan several times and listened to him speak at confabs over here. We recall him describing Banexi's strength:
"What we can do is build companies with complex business models in a complex market," he said. "Europe is multilingual, multicultural. The business culture varies from country to country. Just try negotiating with a Dutch merchant, for example. They are tough. Or try entering the German market, where newcomers are not exactly welcomed. This is the kind of thing that we know."
Read - Pulsevision becomes Kewego (press release)
Read - Michel Meyer 2.0(kelblog)
Posted on April 27, 2006 05:02 PM | Posted to Interactive TV | Venture Capital | Web 2.0 | Permalink
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