« inLive Mass Audience Participation | Main | Cambridge Broadband Founder Heads New Chip Startup »
June 07, 2006
Acacia Eyes Mobile Video And Online Communities
The IDG Ventures European team has bought out the interest of its lone sponsor, renamed itself Acacia Capital Partners, is now readying itself to make four or five new investments, as well as work with existing portfolio companies.
Ajay Chowdhury, managing partner, spoke to the alarm:clock euro about where he sees opportunity for investment in the region. "We are very impressed by what YouTube has achieved. We're interested mobile TV and shared video files," he said.
We asked him to be bit more specific. "We think that video clips will end up being downloaded for a few cents each. As the files are shared, another few cents can be generated. We want to invest in ways to enable revenue generation [in these types of applications], such as micropayments technology," said Chowdhury.
Online communities with user generated content are also a target in a "big way", but Chowhury said that he prefers to back teams that already have established a large community of interest. For example, he pointed to portfolio firm Shazam, a wireless music discovery company, which is adding more interactive features for its 5 million strong community.
Because of the age of the fund, new investments will tend towards the later stage. But will look to early stage again with the next fund.
Acacia Capital Partners raised the capital to buy out the $100M fund from IDG from a syndicate of LPs, including Switzerland-based Partners Group and Access Capital Partners. They did it without any corporate finance advisors (which says something positive about its partners' dealmaking ability). It has so far invested about $50M of the original fund.
Posted on June 7, 2006 11:40 AM | Posted to Venture Capital | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1312
