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July 30, 2007
Wolfson Acquires VC-backed Sonaptic For Upto $40M
Scottish micro-electronics powerhouse Wolfson (probably best known as a supplier of Apple's iPod components) has acquired five year old Sonaptic, a VC backed venture chip startup that is specialized in audio chips for consumer electronics products for up to $40M (if earn outs are achieved after an initial payment of about $25M).
According to a statement we received from Sandy McKinnon, a partner at Pentech, the startup's early stage backer, Sonaptic was doing about $4M a year in sales and employed 31 people in Scotland.
Pentech invested in 2003, so this is a pretty quick turnaround for the Scottish early stage tech fund. The inside scoop is that it was a choice of raising a new VC round or taking an offer from acquisitive strategic investors, according to some insight in a TechConfidential report (see link below).
This is the second audio tech startup Wolfson has acquired in recent months. It also bought a pre-VC acoustic MEMs startup a few months ago called Oligon, which was also Scottish and co-founded by Richard Laming and Mark Hesketh. Price paid was about $5.7M we hear.
Laming was a Kymata cofounder, an extremely well funded optoelectronics startup that attracted big name VCs during the last venture cycle, which was eventually sold to Alcatel for in excess of $110M.
Read - sonapitc pays off for investors (techconfidential-thedeal.com )
Posted at 01:02 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Semiconductors | TrackBack | Permalink
July 27, 2007
Tradedoubler Pays £56M For Search Marketing's IMW
UK-based affiliate network TradeDoubler has bought Stockholm-based Internet Marketing Works (IMW Group), which operates search marketing firms for $115M in cash.The multiple doesn't seem vast as IMW says it earned £7.8M in profit on a turnover of £69M.
IMW is perhaps best known for its keyword buy product Bidbuddy.
Read - announcement
Posted at 12:44 AM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
July 24, 2007
Germany's Q-Cells Leads $50M Investment Into Solaria
German solar company Q-Cells has led a $50M investment in Fremont, CA-based Solaria while also committing to a long-term solar cell supply deal.
Solaria has designed a solar panel around proprietary plastic lenses that magnify the light on solar cells. As part of the deal, Q-Cells said, over the next 10 years it will give Solaria access to 1.35 gigawatts of Q-Cell's solar cells, the material in panels that converts light to electricity.
The companies said it was one of the largest solar-cell supply arrangements on record and will allow Solaria to produce 2.7 gigawatts worth of solar panels.
Read - announcement
Posted at 02:30 AM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink
July 23, 2007
Blavatnik to Buy Web Sports' Premium TV for £25M
US-based billionaire industrialist Len Blavatnik has announced that he is buying Premium TV for £25M ($50M). The company manages video-based websites for several sports groups such as Chelsea Football Club and the Premier League. Premium TV was once a subsidiary of NTL (now Virgin Media). However, in 2002 NTL filed for bankruptcy and Premium TV was bought by Quest Turnaround Advisors.
Read - Reuters story
View - site
Posted at 08:27 AM | Posted to Broadband Networks | TrackBack | Permalink
July 22, 2007
Dresden Solar Tech's Heliateck Gets Strategic Funding
Dresden, Germany's Heliatek has raised funding from Wellington along with BASF and Bosch. This is the startup's first round of funding led by an institutional VC-- the a:c euro reported its seed round last October. BASF and Bosch are each investing 1.6M Euros. The announcement was supported by the German government which says it will be investing in this sector alongside BASF and Bosch.
Heliatek is commercializing organic thin-film technology to make solar cells.
One item of note here is that the deal shows that the High-Tech Gründerfonds, despite investing at a fast clip is making some good calls, choosing ventures with solid potential.
Read - announcement
Posted at 08:32 PM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink
July 20, 2007
NetNetNet.TV Finalizes 26M Swiss Franc Buyout of Incite Media
NetNetNet.tv has finalized a purchase agreement with Incite Media for 26M Swiss Francs. The acquisition of Incite Media was financed by Festus FD in Liechtenstein.
Incite Media is a Swiss-based company that specializes in Customer Relationship Management and Digital Asset Management across a number of media platforms. Incite Media sells brand advertisers and retailers a media platform from content creation and display, where they are able to take digital assets and create true divergent media. Netnetnet.tv will display these media assets on its screens, on mobile
phones and across the internet putting the advertisements directly where the decision to buy is taken and therefore with less divergence losses.
Says Richard Walker, CEO of Netnetnet.tv: "Incite Media's digital media management and content delivery technology will help our strategy to become the premier out-of-home advertising medium."
Read - announcement
Posted at 07:10 PM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
German Gov't Gives $165M To Developers Of Search Engine Theseus
Only in Europe would a government decide to compete with Google. The German government is investing $165M in a multimedia search project called Theseus. It will initially fund Siemens, SAP, Deutsche Thomson and EMPOLIS with later funding going to smaller businesses.
As Marketing Pilgrim points out, Isn't there a conflict of interest here if the EU is both a competitor to Google and a watchdog?
Read - AP report
Posted at 03:45 PM | Posted to Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
Google Invests In UK Femtocell Startup Ubiquisys
We have been following Swindon-based Ubiquisys since May of last year and in fact reported on a rumor that Cisco was mulling an investment. It turns out Google has picked up the tab. Ubiquisys is developing intelligent 3G femtocell access points for the residential market. Today it announced that t has secured a 2nd round funding totaling $25M. The startup's first round backers Accel Partners, Atlas Venture and Advent Venture Partners are joined by Google.
Ubiquisys device gives mobile users high-quality mobile coverage in the home using their usual 3G cell phones. It plugs into an existing home broadband gateway or is built into a gateway product that includes WiFi, DSL, Ethernet, phone ports and USB.
For cellcos, and ultimately their subscribers, the company's products solve a problem with 3G phones at home where costs of providing indoor cellular coverage have been prohibitive for cellcos, and the battery power consumption has turned off consumers.
What is more, it will enable VOIP services from cellcos.The idea is that cellcos will better be able to compete with the emerging WiFi and wireless VOIP innovations emerging on the market if they have such systems to sell.
It sounds like a good idea since 3G is being deployed in many large sized markets and cellcos need something to fight off the growing number of startups in the Wifi/VOIP area.
In June, the company announced it was working with Netgear on collaboration to deliver a residential gateway with integrated DSL modem, Wi-Fi, VoIP and 3G femtocell technology under the Netgear brand. It also has partnerships with Sony (for the design and manufacturing of the basestations), and Netopia for product-enhancing software, along with a few others such deals that will make the gear easier to install and compatible with several telco standards.
There is another startup we've covered that has similar gear, 4G Systems over in Germany, which was founded back in 2002 and has some early stage financing behind it too, although its core features concentrate more on cellular data services, as we understand it.
View - site
Posted at 03:17 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
July 19, 2007
Mangrove Invests in Luxembourg's Music Service Jamendo
Jamendo has raised an undisclosed amount of first round funding from Mangrove Capital Partners. The Luxembourg-based company currently offers a relatively small number DRM-free music tracks under Creative Commons license. Jamendo says it currently gets about 500K unique visitors per month and in January it began offering its registered artists a 50-50 rev shard on the ad revenue the site receives.
Jamendo takes advantage of BitTorrent peer to peer technology to distribute tracks at a very large scale.
The company was co-founded in by Pierre Gerard, Sylvain Zimmer and CEO Laurent Kratz who was
Managing Partner USWeb/CKS - marchFIRST. They also launched another startup at Lesfrontaliers.lu
View - site
Read - PaidContent Post
Posted at 06:39 PM | Posted to Media | TrackBack | Permalink
Photoways Funded By US Backer
Created by the merger of Photoways and Photobox last year, Photoways Group has closed a new round of funding at €10M. New investor HarbourVest Partners out of Boston is leading the Series B round, with early investors Index Ventures and Highland Capital Partners back in the round.
Photoways and Photobox offer a service for online photo sharing, storing and printing.The Photoways group was founded in 1999 in France and is now in 15 European countries. The company merged with the UK's Photobox in April 2006. Pierre Chappaz, founder of Kelkoo and Netvibes, is Chairman of the Board and Stan Laurent, formerly COO at AOL Europe, is President & CEO.
Read - press release
Posted at 06:03 PM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
BuyVIP Continues Private Shopping Club Momentum
We covered pan-European exclusive (invite-only) Internet shopping site, BuyVIP, a few months back when we spotted a Euro trend in online shopping clubs. Today 3i announced an investment in BuyVIP.
BuyVIP offers luxury fashion and lifestyle brands to registered users. BuyVIP has German and Spanish language versions of its site. In March it raised €2M from MCI (a family office advised by Active Capital Partners), Grupo Intercom (VC arm of Spanish Internet holding co.) and a pool of investors represented by Valkiria Network International Holding. It was founded by Gustavo Garciá Brusilowsky and Gerald Heydenreich. The two previously build PORTUM, an auction and procurement platform that did €5B in turnover, which was acquired by IBX Europe in 2006.
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This is the latest early stage investment for 3i's global venture capital team who will bring 3i's retail experience (Gant, Interflora, Hobbs, Defimode, Home Decor, PCDStores, Republic) to help BuyVIP to expand from its Spanish, German and Italian bases.
The startup was founded in Madrid in 2006 and has seen great growth. In March they told us they had 200K members and now they say the number is up to 500K. They peg the growth rate at 70K members and over 40 campaigns each month. Its campaigns offer luxury branded products from Joop, DKNY, Apple, Alessi, Mandarina Duck, Nike, Puma and Columbia and others.
View - site
Posted at 04:58 PM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
Confidential Documents Manager BrainLoop Goes Abroad
Discretion has always been a hallmark of Bavarians. So its not a surprise to see that document protection startup Brainloop is a great success and has been growing at a 100% rate in each of the past 2 years.
Munich-based Brianloop has raised funding from BayTech Venture Capital which made a sole Series A investment of €2M. Founded in 2000, Brainloop is a software-as-a-service provider for managing confidential documents in the enterprise. The company claims over 200 companies. Confidential documents include boardroom communication, financial reporting, and corporate M&A projects.
Read - announcement
Posted at 04:47 PM | Posted to Financial Data Service | TrackBack | Permalink
July 17, 2007
Norway's Electric Car Company TH!NK GLOBAL Raises $60M
Norway's tiny car maker TH!NK GLOBAL has raised $60M in funding to support a new version of its all-electric, two-seater auto.
TH!NK GLOBAL was formerly part of the Ford Motor Company which invested $50M in R&D before punting it. TH!NK was taken over by a group of Norwegian investors in March 2006. Specifically, TH!NK GLOBAL was acquired in March 2006 by Alf Bjørseth, Reidar Langmo and Jan Otto Ringdal. The three made a fortune having founded Norway’s Renewable Energy Corporation, one of the biggest solar energy companies.
Despite the company's long, slow history now with the growing interest in low fuel use and low emissions, the company is getting its legs. TH!NK began its life in the mid 1990s, developed by a Norwegian company named PIVCO (for Personal Independent Vehicle Company). PIVCO's third-generation vehicle, launched in 1995, was named CityBee in Europe and Citi in USA. In 1996, 120 CityBees/Citi's were built, with over a third shipped to California to participate the Bay Area Rapid Transit station car program.
The latest round comes in part from new investors DFJ Element and RockPort Capital Partners and brings total external funding this year to $90M. London-based Hazel Capital and CG Holding, also new investors, joined existing institutional backers Canica, Capricorn Investment Group, and Wintergreen Advisors in the round.
The cars will come off the assembly line in December and TH!NK is offering a three-month trial period.
Read - Red Herring story
Posted at 11:34 PM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink
July 16, 2007
GDI Plots €1B Flotation
This one seems to have come out of left field. Virgin owned Game Development International is net yet a fully launched business and it is talking up a €1B listing in the UK. Amazingly, the full commercial launch of AWOMO is not scheduled for the end of the year and in fact they barely even have a Web site at this point.
(Editors note: Slow it down fellows. Let's make sure that it works and they you can make money!)
Virgin Games has a 20% stake in GDI, which is currently drawing up a prospectus prior to seeking a dual listing in London and Frankfurt.
The start-up is based in Germany where it has created an online virtual world that some see as similar to Second Life. However, we don't really see the similarity, rather it seems like more of a competitor to Steam or Bittorrent as rapid game downloading platforms.
GDI brands its 3D-generated reality technology A World of My Own (AWOMO). It allows PC users to rapidly buy, download and play a game. The Independent reports that GDI has agreements to distribute 100 games from 18 publishers on its AWOMO platform.
View - the Independent story
Posted at 10:16 PM | Posted to | TrackBack | Permalink
July 14, 2007
de la Maison Home Furnishing eCommerce Venture Funded
Delamaison.fr, which sells home furnishing and decorations, has raised €3.3M in financing from Xange and OTC, we learned via one of the startup's early backers, Inspirational Stores Group and Photoways founder Michel de Guilhermier's blog.
Another former Photoways C-level manager Frank Brusco runs the finance now at delamaison. The team, according to its early backer, is simply 'top drawer': frugal and pragmatic, yet totally service and customer-oriented.
The site gets a lot of traffic and it has an innovative user interface that offers visually appealing (at least to this reporter) showrooms for its brandname suppliers. The new money is to expand the number of products on offer, says Journal du Net in a profile of the company this week.
The startup took corporate finance advice from Christophe Chausson of Chausson Finance and retained legal advice from cabinet Pinot de Villechenon's Erwan Tostivint.
Posted at 04:40 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Upcoming Events For alarm:clock euro
The alarm:clock's European correspondent and reporter of the first hour, Valerie Thompson is going to be at the following upcoming events. If any regular readers would like to meet up on these day, we have lots of time free. Just write to valerie [[ at ]] thealarmclock [[dot]] com
IE-Club Evening event
Paris Sept 22 to 23
EVCA Technology Conference At event all day Thursday and Friday morning
Stockholm October 3 to 5
Tech Tour: England
Fall 2007 TBC
http://www.techtour.com/english07/index.php
Posted at 04:27 PM | Posted to Events | TrackBack | Permalink
July 13, 2007
Neuhaus Funds Verwandt.de To Cross Borders
We heard from Neuhaus Capital today that it has invested in verwandt.de, a young site that helps you find members of your family and to create a family tree. We heard about it a few weeks and remember reading the only negative comments were about its limitation to Germany. It is pretty rare for anyone in Europe or North America and beyond these days to have all their family in one country.
It got great press coverage and after two weeks online some 220,000 profiles were set up.
Now with Neuhaus on board, the startup will get the money to move beyond their original focus on the German-speaking market.
It has a nice map feature that lets you type in a family name and see the whereabouts of perhaps long lost relations. We didn't have enough time to explore the source of the name data.
There is no word yet on how this will make money, but if it keeps growing at this pace it will find it one way or the other.
Read- Aannouncement in Verwandt.de blog
Posted at 04:13 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Ex-Ballard Trio Seeded For Fuel Cell Startup in Stuttgart
Three former Ballard Power Systems employees in Germany have raised an undisclosed amount from business angels to develop their fuel cell business, FutureE Fuel Cell Solutions.
The startup says it develops, manufactures, and sells PEM Fuel Cells that generate between 0,5 and 20 kW. The firm says you can combine up to 4 units to get higher outputs.
Its cells are used primarily as emergency generators in the telecoms market.
The sixth month old company was founded by a trio (pictured here) that worked together at early fuel cell market entrant Ballard Power Systems' German unit. They will use the seed capital to hire up.
FutureE took corporate finance advice from i.con. innovation GmbH and legal advice from CMS Hasche Sigle, Stuttgart.
View FutureE
Posted at 07:45 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Seedcamp Speed Brief
(20 founders X 7 days) + mentors + €250K divided by 5 = Seedcamp
Seedcamp, an incubator-like project led by Saul Klein, an Index Ventures venture partner, is getting the word out this week as it accelerates the recruitment drive for its upcoming event. The deadline for application is August 12.
Publications like VentureBeat, PEHub (EVCJ) wrote about it and it’s been in the blogs over here for several weeks now.
At the end of the one week event, the investors (Index Ventures, we presume) will own a 10 percent stake in 5 startups that will benefit from 3 months of support in London thereafter.
The 5 startups will be chosen by the likes of Andreas Schlenker of Partech International in Paris; Avid Larizadeh of Accel Partners, Greg Marsh of Index Ventures in London, Irena Goldenberg of Highland Capital Partners in Geneva, Olivier Schuepbach of Wellington Partners in Germany, Paul Fisher of Advent Ventures, Pierre Festal of Atlas Venture in London, and Sean Seton-Rogers of Balderton Capital.
There are so many sites we could link to, we went random and picked one that is new to us.
Read Saul Klein Launches Seedcamp (intruders.tv)
Posted at 06:49 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
July 12, 2007
Sweden's SWE-DISH Satellite Systems Bought By US Rival
SWE-DISH Satellite Systems, a Swedish designer and manufacturer of portable and transportable satellite communications systems, has been acquired by DataPath, a Georgia-based rival. The amount of the deal is not yet known. SWE-DISH was formed in 1994 and raised capital from Litorina Kapital, 3i Nordic and Nordic Wireless.
Units range from suitcase size to car size
View - site
Posted at 08:25 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Trivop vs TvTrip
Techcrunch has early news about a $4.8M round funding round for TvTrip a video guide to hotels, now backed by European VCs, it said.
Techcrunch also compared TvTrip to Trivop, which is backed by business angels and out of France, last month. (See links below).
Read- Trivop post
(alarm:clock euro )
Read TvTrip The Second Video Guide for Hotels (techcrunch)
Posted at 07:43 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
July 11, 2007
Esprit and Intel New Investors In Virtualogix fka Jaluna
VirtualLogix, whose embedded systems technology can speed the adoption of Linux in things like mobilephones, routers, and other kinds of electronics gear, has raised a $16M Series B round led by Esprit Capital Partners, and brought in new investor Intel Capital, along with earlier investors, Atlas Venture and Index Ventures.
The startup’s software is used for virtualization inside connected devices and it can execute at speed, it says. The pitch is that its technology enables its communications electronics customers to “lower bill of materials, improve security and reliability, while speeding time to market", supporting proprietary and open source software.
Back in 2004, the startup, which was then called Jaluna, and headquartered in France, raised a $12M Series A from Atlas Venture and Index Ventures. That was a huge sized round for France at that time.
In the meantime, it has a US CEO and a Silicon Valley HQ.
The company was able to raise such a round because of the track record of its founding CEO, Michel Gien, who is still with the company in a CTO role.
Gien spun out a development group, some 25 engineers, from Sun Microsystems in mid-2002. They had been developing an operating system agnostic platform for telecommunications equipment, such as routers and switches. Gien had been with Sun since 1997 when Sun bought his 11 year old company, Chorus Systems SA (St. Quentin, France).
View Virtualogix
Posted at 08:40 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Internet of Things Drives Wavecom's Turnaround
Good news this morning, Wavecom, a wireless embedded systems company, is back from brink. The French company which almost went out of a business a few short years ago has successfully restructured and now boasts a stock price that tripled over the past year.
It just raised €80.5M by issuing convertible bonds and grew sales by double digits in the last couple of years too.
Sales are up from €130M in 2005 to €189M in 2006. It has a gross margin of almost 43 percent, and a mkt cap (NASDAQ) of a little over half a billion dollars. It is also traded on the Euronext.
We looked at Wavecom's share price this morning after one of our first readers and cheerleaders sent an email asking us if we had seen any M&A activity in the GPRS component category, which brought Wavecom's acquisition last year of unit of SonyEricsson to bolster its move in to the m2m market.
Wavecom was one of the bubble era high fliers (don't forget that in Europe the bubble was more of a telecoms bubble than a dotcom bubble), after raising a relatively $100m in an ipo and secondary offering during that period.
But it just barely survived the subsequent bust. (See chart below - for historic view)
Today it sells Wireless CPUs, applications and connectivity software, and software dev tools. It also started to license its protocol stack too.
The cellphone standard GSM and CDMA were the foundation of its original success and it now has a proprietary platform it is deploying for what some folks, like The Economist newspaper, call the "Internet of Things".
It is a category that we have become more aware of due to keeping in touch with Alexander Casassovici, the founder of another French company, Wavestorm. He not only writes a lively blog about it called Mobitrends but he is living it with his startup's existing products, and an exciting new one in development.
There is a good article in British trade pub New Electronics, where CEO Ron Black said:
“About 10 years ago, it was forecast that the non handset market would be enormous and that all these machines would benefit from sharing information. All this was true, but making it a reality has been a big problem until recently.”The reason for the slow takeoff, according to Black is a fragmented market and that has eluded standards bodies.
It smartly diversified from the mobilephone and pda markets, and now sells the aforementioned machine-to-machine applications, as well as automotive products, and wireless telephony software and hardware.
We only have one thing to say about it: more of this please.
Posted at 05:13 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Portugal's EDP Wants To Take US By Wind Storm
Energias de Portugal (EDP) is buying Horizon Wind Energy from The Goldman Sachs Group for $2.15B. Horizon develops and owns wind power generation in the US.
EDP CEO Antonio Mexia says that whereas Portugal and Europe have been innovating in wind for decades , the US has not. So it's a natural fit for a European company like his to consolidate the US market. He wants to expand Horizon's slice of the US wind market from about 9% this year to about 12% by 2010 and above 12% by 2020.
EDP wants to do an IPO with Horizon and NEO Energia, an alternative energy subsidiary in Europe, in 2008. Mexia said the company has not yet decided whether to list the shares in New York or Europe.
Additionally, EDP wants to use Horizon as a base to expand into adjacent markets like Mexico and perhaps Canada as well as into other types of alternative energy, solar in particular.
For those wondering how hard it is to raise money for alternative energy in the US, Mexia is telling you its like taking candy from a baby "Financing is not really a problem for alternative energy development in the U.S. market," Mexia said. When it was looking to buy Horizon, banks offered EDP more than twice the money it needed.
Posted at 12:24 AM | Posted to Alternative Energy | TrackBack | Permalink
Wales' vBulletin (aka Jelsoft) Bought By Interent Brands
Wales-based vBulletin (Jelsoft) has dominated the bulletin boards space as long as we can remember. Now the Welsh startup had been bought by Internet Brands. The deal happended just after the vBulletin suite , which is comprised of a forum software and a project management tool, just released a blogging module.
vBulletin has a huge base of loyal users that Internet Brands might be able to bring into the age of blogging. Its a contrarian investment by Internet Brands but we believe it will turn out to be a shrewd one that stands in sharp contrast to the lofty valuation paid by investors for Ning yesterday.
Read - announcement
Posted at 12:17 AM | Posted to Specialized Software | TrackBack | Permalink
July 10, 2007
Sports Soc Nets On The Rise
Suunto, the high tech sports monitor company, has been running what you could call a social network for its sporty customers, with various forums based on sport preference on SuuntoSports.com.
We don't know how much it cost them but by the looks of it they spent some money on it. Maybe it should have just waited a while and snapped up one of the growing number of sports communities of interest that have popped up in the Euro neighbourhood in the meantime.
There's Sanoodi that just raised a seed round from Swiss, US, and British investors, according to Mobile Marketing Magazine Elsewhere, an industry-specialized blog writes about it winning a repeat entrepreneur, Rhys Jones, to help build the tech team:
There's WidiWici over in France whose good-looking site is a lot more populated since the first time we looked at it about a year ago.
And over in Germany Deutsche Startups, the newsblog backed by the Samwer brothers, has briefed about 10 sport social network in a post today. The three getting the most buzz, it says, are “Champions World” which has a partnership with FC Hertha BSC and MTV ; “meinSport.de” and sportme. Follow the link below to get the links to their sites.
Wettkampf der Sportnetzwerke :: deutsche-startups.de
Posted at 08:28 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Holtzbrinck Bids €56M for Abacho
Georg von Holtzbrinck announced its continuing bid to acquire Abacho, a daughter company of Endemann Internet AG. The deal values the company at €56M, reports Die Tagespiegel, which is slightly higher than the stock market is valuing the venture if our source is correct.
Abacho runs Abacho.de and My-Hammer.de, the auction platform for manual labor contracts and services. Abacho owns about 68.75 percent of it, while a Holtzbrinck subsidiary owns the rest. Founder Ingo Endemann owns 29.72 percent of Abacho.
Verlagsgruppe Holtzbrinck bietet für Abacho
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Posted at 07:40 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Inside The Intel And Mirics Deal
We took a closer look at the recent $10M Intel Capital investment in the UK fabless startup Mirics. It surprised us that only Intel was brought in for the round, along with its original early stage backer Pond Ventures, a UK VC that has a knack for finding hot chip startups on this side of the Atlantic.
From what we hear Mirics has some smart silicon, a multi-radio-standard chip that is still cheap enough that manufacturers of your basic kitchen-countertop radio are potential customers – kind of gives you a little frisson if you think about the volume of chips they could end up shipping (well it gave us one, anyway).
No wonder, Intel requested an “exclusive” right to invest now and in the future.
Read on to learn what Michael Gera, of Pond Ventures, (pictured nearby) and Mirics board member, told us by email about being hot in Korea and Japan and the startup's big-gun attracting chip business. By the way, Gera speaks English, French, German, Italian, Maltese, Russian and Spanish. He gave us the interview in English.
Do you have some design-in wins?
At this stage, design wins are confidential. However in the current investment climate, nobody completes a B-round with major “big-gun” investors without showing significant commercial opportunities or engagements.
Any particular geography or market that is demanding these multi-standard radio chips?
Today, Japan and Korea are leading the demand for multi-standard. It is worth noting that these regions have high domestic demand, and their manufacturers are now looking at strategies to leverage their domestic experience into export markets. Elsewhere in the world, the device competes effectively against single-standard offerings – it is worth remembering that it is a cost-effective choice for single-standard as well as multi-standard applications.
Will it first be found in mobilephones, or will it be another kind of CE device?
This is a hard question to answer! In Japan, the entire mobile TV market is focused on the cellphone, while in Korea, the majority of T-DMB receivers are non-cellphone applications. Today we are working with products spanning cellphones, PMPs, PNDs and other form factors – even traditional “kitchen radios”.
What is Mirics going to do with the capital?
We intend to extend our capability in engineering, and extend the reach of our commercial and customer support operations. This will allow us to accelerate some of our key roadmap developments while also supporting the customers and partners we are already working with on our first generation.
Was there competition to invest - that is did other VCs in Europe or abroad make a bid to invest?
Several VCs were actively working with us when Intel asked us to enter a period of exclusivity, and have expressed interest in pursuing future investment opportunities with Mirics.
Thank you for taking the time. ENDS
Posted at 06:59 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Euro VC Deal Roundup
A couple of euro deals to report thanks to the excellent weekly newsletter from Library House.
SonicEmotion, a Swiss startup that does flat panel sound systems, has raised some venture capital from an early stage Swiss fund called VI Venture Partners. Your a:c reporter wrote about Sonic Emotion for swissinfo back in 2004. It was a publication that few investor types read, apparently ;-)
Silent Communications out of Israel has raised an undisclosed amount from Sequoia Capital and Meir Goldfinger. The three year old startup does text to speech technology and markets the service as Talk In Silence. 'Globes' speculates that it was $5M sized round.
The company behind Trackaphone, which claims to be able to find a phone anywhere in the world (which is kind of spooky) raised a seed round from a regional UK fund. The four year old company is expected to do a larger venture financing round this year, according to Library House.
Posted at 07:07 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
July 09, 2007
France's Zlio Raises $4M From Mangrove
France's Zlio has raised $4M million from Mangrove Capital Partners, the first institutional investors in Skype. Zlio had been bootsrapped. The company's CEO gets in touch to let us know about Zlio's growth both on the French
and the US fronts.
+ The site is now attracting over 2.5M monthly unique visitors and has over 100K created!
+ It has over 3M products
+ Zlio wil be launching its UK branch in the very near future.
Zlio competes with RightCart, MyPickList, WhatsBuzzing, ShopWiki, Kaboodle, Crowdstorm, Pepperjam and Jellyfish, StyleHive, ThisNext and Wists. Several of these are showing a good number of users so we can expect even more competitors who will need to differentiate with a twist. Zlio may find that its European center of gravity to be a strength.
View - site
Posted at 09:21 PM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
MojoWatch.eu: Euro Tech Stoxx, XMOS, Asknet
Mojo Found
asknet AG Gets Some Growth On. The German online software distribution company that runs Europe's biggest portal for software downloads in Europe, is growing in the US market winning two more US software publishers, and adding some more buisness in Europe too. It did €41M last year and says it is on track to grow that to over €57M this year. Its traded in Germany on the Entry Standard.
XMOS Puts The Wow Back in consumer electronics and three pages on a European chip startup in EETimes . That is mojo. XMOS Semiconductor, sounds like it may have an FPGA killer chips. Well, maybe not a killer of the FPGA, but a chip architecture that industry analysts and editors alike can see a lot of potential in because it enables manufacturers to develop customized and programmable chips without having to spend on FPGAs, or an ASIC/ASSP, in the volumes of cash they are now. The founder is a luminary in chip engineering, David May, who architected the transputer back in the 80s. Amadeus and Esprit are the early investors in this Bristol-based startup.
European Large Cap Tech Stocks Are Up. The DJ Euro Tech Stoxx index is up over the past 12 months, after being down for so long. Those many critics of the European tech can now take some of their words back. And before anyone starts to think we're heading for a bubble again, just compare the one year performance, above, to the one below that includes the period of 199 to 2001. That would be that giant peak in the middle, the one that we are far from right now.
Mojo Lost
Can't find any today...
Posted at 07:17 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
London VC Leads Nanotron €10M Round
Nanotron Technologies, a low-power wireless sensor networking chip developer, has secured a nice sized €10 million funding round led by London- based zouk ventures, which is specialized in cleantech. The syndicate, described in a press announcement by zouk, comprised Polytechnos, Danfoss, and IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft - VC Fonds Berlin. The executive management team also participated in the funding round.
Marketing and product development for location aware applications in industry are the target for the new capital. We assume that RFID and GPS systems and solutions are seen as cleantech because they can potentially reduce co2 emissions and fuel use in the logistics and transport sectors.
View Nanotron
Posted at 07:17 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
The Problem With Euro VC
Journalist Tom Allchorne on PeHub asked last week What is Wrong with European Venture Capital?
He writes:
LPs are now apparently asking their US venture fund managers to set-up shop in Europe – they would rather put their money into a European fund run by a US firm than one run by a European house. Is this true?
So far only two commenters answered. euroGP wrote:
The only problem with Euro VC is a lack of decent post-bubble data showing the truth, but the trend you mention is real with US LPs asking US GPs to expand globally; they are coming - starting with the multiple co-investments we’ve seen from Sequoia, Granite, DFJ, Doll, Insight, Bessemer etc.
Meanwhile, let’s celebrate the 110+ $100m+ exits in Europe by European VCs in last 3 years which have created $25 billion of value - created without US VCs somehow.
We see the co-investment trend too, but are not so sure about a lack of "decent post-bubble" data. There was some floating around last year. (Euro vs US exits ).
Henry from Paris, an Index Ventures' fan, writes that the Euro affiliates of US firms "have significant deficiencies and would never get the deal flow if it weren’t for their US brethren. Witness the recent breakup of Benchmark in Europe... "
We think that the dealflow aspect is what the LPs would be counting on - it is not a negative, at least from the institutional investors' point of view.
The response to the post, all two of them, and some of the things that are written in euro VC blogs, reveal how lightly the European market is served with information about its tech venture capital sector: its nature, shape, and size.
Even Allchrome says that he doesn't have the exact numbers on how much capital tech-oriented VCs have raised - and from whom - because the stats that he has access to "don’t break it down into venture and buyouts".
The VCs probably have to do something to get out from behind firewall-protected and steep subscription priced sources. But it won't be here.
The alarm:clock euro reports about new VC funds raised, we'll interview investors, and report on VC trends, because we follow the money. It is just one part of our following the money trip, though. (Who's making it -- bootstrappers and innovateurs, who's raising it, who's burnt it, and who is putting money in the bank as a result of a "liquidity event" are some of the others.)
We'll check back on Allchrome's post to see if anything more happens over there.
Posted at 06:59 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
Zooming In Opera Mobile Metrics
Opera's sales may not be inspiring to write about but penetration of the mobile market by the Norwegian software company is coming along. Despite the notoriously high barriers to entry in the mobilephone software market, its Mini browser had been downloaded by 15M individuals as of April 2007 and it is getting pre-installed on several new mobilephones. It is also making inroads into set-top boxes and console platforms and higher end smartphones (Opera Mobile).
Its browsers are found in mobilephones from Nokia, Samsung, and a few others. Even the WindowsMobile phone platform uses it (HTC is a customer and it manufactures 70 percent of Windows phones, according to a 1Q07 ir presentation on opera's site pdf file)
We like Opera Mini ourselves and have had various releases installed on an aging Sonyericsson i780 since late 2005. A short stint with or Orange WAP browser last month had us going back Opera in no time.
The Mini browser generates 800M page views a month as of May. If it gets the kind of cpm rates that we get from FM Publishing, then its management will be smiling in a few months.
If it's not making money on that kind of traffic, maybe it should think about buying a mobile advertising startup like Rapid Mobile, the Scottish startup behind Ad360, which so far has managed to elude VC investors and has yet to be acquired, as far as we know - unlike Screentonic over in France, which Microsoft acquired.
Developing the Ad360 interstitial ads platform might be a way of making more money, not that we have any idea if its founders have the venture up for sale, or deeper insight into Opera's strategy than anyone else who can read its investors relations pages .
What we can say is that the stats graphics we snagged are impressive, and that the default Opera Mini-homepage runs Yahoo search bar, which will be a revenue source. It delivers a couple of default news channels and a link to Opera's social network or MyOpera Community, which is growing too. MyOpera counts 850K users as of May and it's Norway's third most popular web-destination, according to Opera.
Posted at 06:20 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
July 08, 2007
Zinwave Raising Capital To Make Wireless Go Further
Getting cellphone calls in elevators and underground offices is a hit and miss thing. And pity the network managers that cannot make sure Blackberry-wielding executives get their emails and messages wherever they are in the building or parking garage.
So we figure Zinwave out of England, which can solve that problem without a massive capital expenditure, is onto a good thing.
We will soon find out if VCs feel the same way as it is currently raising €15M. Zinwave, which was founded back in 2002, raised an $8M series A round from Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity Partners. It is now raising its B round, according to one of its backers, Stuart Patterson at SEP, the investment company that helped MTEM from the research lab to a couple of hundred million acquisition target in three years.
There's a buzz on right now about inbuilding cellular coverage. And Zinwave can benefit from it with its recently released products and a broadband solution that supports anything from land mobile radio to cellular and Wi-Fi over the typically existing fiber infrastructure.
Basically, it figured out how slip radio signals into a single optical cable and pump them out wherever normal antennas fail.
It's a so-called Optical Distributed Antenna System. That means a network manager connect Zinwave hub (shown above) to remotely placed antenna units, over fiber, and they can add a basestation to boost particular cellular network coverage, if required.
It claims the ability to carry 2G, 3G, PMR/LMR, TETRA, Wi-Fi, WiMAX - anything operating in the 370MHz to 2.5GHz range.
There are four competitors for this type of in-building gear, each with their own strenghts and weaknesses, as the Computergram article we linked to below suggests. Patterson says Zinwave's closest competitor is MobileAccess, which uses different cabling.
He also explained that Zinwave's origin was a university reserach breakthrough, a technology in search of a problem, and that it took the team about a year to figure out where the sweet spot in the market was for it.
It now has some reference customers like Tyco's headquarters in the US, and the plan is to ramp up, secure the easier RFPs it gets, like emergency services TETRA systems, and to grow the customer base internationally.
Read Computegram Analysis of Zinwave and Co.
View - Zinwave
Posted at 07:11 PM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Tech Investing And Marathons
Vator TV is running a series on how to be an entrepreneur. We liked the one from SlingBox founder Blake Krikorian. Vator writes:
Blake Krikorian started Sling Media, his idea wasn't cheered at the onset. Rather, it was looked upon as a bit crazy. It took persistence in an idea and vision to convince the market a Slingbox would be in demand, according to Blake.
So for all the founders that read this blog, you can take heart from his success. Krikorian also says it's a roller coaster and "it is not a sprint it's a marathon."
The marathon metaphor reminded us of a list we're working on about techie marathon runners. If you look at the names, and if you know the people even in the outsider way a journalist does, persistence and endurance are evident in their workstyle.
Interestingly, our list is mainly investor types. If you're a founder and are into this kind of sport email us valerieatthealarmclock.com
- Julien Codorniou, head of Microsoft's IDEEs in Paris: runs 20ks and gets early stage companies up to speed
- Lois Lemeur, (Paris/San Francisco) vblogger and angel investor runs half marathons and publishes video interviews with his portfolio companies and digerati on both sides of the Atlantic
- Christian Waldvogel, Vinci Capital (Geneva) invests in Swiss IT and telecoms, a most unloved sector
- Marc Goldberg, Occam Capital (Paris) That is him in the photo above. It took him at least three years to raise his turnaround fund for European tech, but he did it and has acquired Mandriva, which was on the brink of insolvency, and Zenops, which combined in-fusio, a well funded mobile games platform company that struggled, and a division of Filao, a CD-ROM/DVD publisher, in its portfolio.
Posted at 03:44 PM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
July 06, 2007
LiveRail Raises Insider Round For Video Ad Network
Our sister site ad:bree is reporting that London-based LiveRailhas launched a new video ad network with a twist. LiveRail ads are optional, and advertisers only pay when someone actually chooses to watch their advert.
"Whenever someone watches a publisher’s video, we serve up a series of highly targeted, relevant ad-previews underneath their main content. If at any point a viewer sees an ad the interests them, they can click it, watch the video and return to their main content when finished. This means advertisers only pay when somebody actually chooses to watch their ad, giving more measurable, more effective and more controllable results."
LiveRail is led by Mark Trefgarne as CEO who is also Managing Director of London-based internet strategy consultancy firm Cleartide. Seed funding was provided by private investors including Cleartide.
View - sitehttp://www.liverail.com
Posted at 11:02 PM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
Micro M&A: Israel's Sportingo Buys UK's CaughtOffside.com
This deal is no more than Sportingo hiring CaughtOffside.com's blogger, but they also get the blog brand and traffic as well. Founded in 2006, CaughtOffside is a popular football blog. Sportingo is a user generated content site run by ten people or so in Israel. It was founded by Tal Barnoach and Ze’ev Rozov, who previously lead a sports multimedia encyclopedic DVD company that went public in London in 1996.
Sports social networks have proven to be very valuable in the US and Sportingo is showing some momentum in Europe.
Read - announcement
Posted at 10:36 PM | Posted to Media | TrackBack | Permalink
Tomorrow Focus Buys Into Dating and User-rated Hotels Sites
Tomorrow Focus, the German online publisher and media company, has acquired 63 percent of Elitemedianet, the company that runs Elitepartner.de, a two year old dating site, reports OneToOne.
The offer is for €8.4M to be paid immediately plus €6M more for the stake, depending on the financial performance. Founders and Elitemedia Beteiligungs GbR will own 20 percent and Burda Digital Ventures, an early investor, with 17 Prozent, after the deal is done.
Tomorrow Focus is publicly traded and its major shareholder is Burda Media.
Elitepartner.de claims 500k registered users with 1K joining daily. It employs 47 and is based in Hamburg. The company's founders Arne Kahlke and Sören Kress will stay on.
Tomorrow Focus is also paying €560K for Holidaycheck.de which has 15K users that rate hotels and holiday destinations. Bulgarian hotels are rated in the above example.
Posted at 05:40 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
July 05, 2007
MobileTV Chip Startup Dibcom Raises €20M In Fifth Round
DiBcom, a Paris-based fabless mobileTV chip startup, raised €20M in a fifth round, it announced today. That means it has raised €60M since founding in 2000.
For a chip company that is not a lot of money, nevertheless it can lay claim to a stake in the emerging mobile TV market. DiBcom says its ICs are used in the majority of DVB-H mobile TV phones currently on sale, notably
in Italy with LG, Sagem and Samsung. PC and notebook manufacturers, TV and other consumer
electronics firms and car manufacturers are buying in too.
Yannick Levy is the CEO of this apparently tightly-run organization that counts 11 institutional investors in addition to the founding team and employees. It employs 150.
Dibcom makes DVB-H chips, which are in the majority of the mobileTV trials, according to the firm's press release.
It achievements
- first company in the world to launch an DVB-H IC
- first chip integrate tuner and demodulator on a single chip.
- implented two multi-band (VHF, UHF and L-Band) components in 90 nanometer, one for DVB-H and the other for DVB-H, DAB and T-DMB.
New investor NATIXIS, subscribed to 50% of the round, and the rest of from existing investors 3i,
Cipio Partners, Convergent Capital, Credit Agricole Private Equity, Intel Capital, Partech International, SGAM Alternative Investments, UMC Capital, and WI Harper.
Posted at 07:57 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
July 04, 2007
Microsoft's Stake In Early Stage Euro Startups
We looked into the Microsoft's IDEAS program that is active in France and neighbouring countries in June. We have been covering this beat long enough to think of Microsoft, and some of the other tech giants out there as startup killers, rather than catalysts for killer startups.
But a couple of things made us follow up to find out more about the well over one-year old program. Several startups in the IDEAS program raised VC, about €90M worth, according to our interview below, and a couple have been acquired to become part of a large software company - no blockbusters yet, mind you. And we have been hearing that quite a few have hit the ground running in part due to participation in program.
The thinking goes: if the VCs are investing there must be some high-potential companies there that are delivering more than just add-ons to Microsoft platforms and making most of their revenues from providing services.
But it was the candid expression of envy of Microsoft's IDEAS and its platform marketing effort by an IBM executive in Paris that clinched it, and made us look up Microsoft's Julien Codorniou, who heads up the effort in Paris. Read on to find out why Microsoft wants to be startup founders' and VC's best friend.
How long has IDEAS been running? And why are you doing it?
IDEAS is a strategic investment in our ISV ecosystem of tomorrow. In France, more than 60% of software developers build applications on the .net platform, many of them work at startups or ISVs, IDEAS' mission is to identify and support the most promising of them. 25 every year.
It's a French initiative, which was launched almost 2 years ago when Bill Gates was in Paris for a conference with the French industry ministry.
Microsoft is probably the most partner-oriented company in the world. 95% of our revenues come from our partners like OEM, SIs and ISVs. We do well when our partners do well. That's why it is life-critical for us to develop, support promote but also renew our ecosystem of partners.
How many startups are in the program?
We recently recruited the 55th, YouSaaS, based in Reims, founded in 2007. The program lasts 2 years. After that, ISVs usually get Gold Certified and enter the usual partner process at Microsoft, pretty efficient.
It's not an exclusive program, i.e, we work with companies using multiple technologies and platforms like Java, or Linux on interoperability issues. Xcalia, an historical Java player, is a good example of that.
Are they all ISVs or do you have some online ventures in there too?
We're looking for innovative software applications and business models, whether it's on your desktop, your browser, your robot, your mobile or XboX.
We embrace the Software + Service vision, so we do really like the Internet Software space, represented iin IDEAS by companies like Idylis, Criteo, Neocase, Sidetrade or Tellmewhere.com.
The big question for us is can such startups get acquired - for VCs a trade sale is your typical exit in Europe
In the last 2 months, 3 IDEAS companies were acquired (AS Infor, Polyspace and Pertinence), and I know that 3 or 4 of them are in final due diligence now with potential acquirers, so they can for sure get acquired, but not by Microsoft, in theory.
We don't take any equity stake in our partners but we want those partners to grow as much as possible. It might sound optimistic, but we're looking for the next big partner like CEGID or Ilog here.
But , we also know that innovative software companies, with strong management teams, strong IP and triple digits growth will sooner or later gather attention from large players.
What is Microsoft getting out of all this?
Well first, it's important to develop a strong and vibrant local software economy. It's important for Microsoft but also for the whole French software industry.
Secondly, IDEAS demonstrate, concretely, that software companies building on the Microsoft platform do much better than the others. It's platform marketing. We get to work with the most promising new software ventures in France, and it brings new and innovative applications for our clients and partners. IDEAS is also a good deal flow for acquisitions. This is, for example, what happened with Screentonic recently. (see our post on the Screentonic deal here)
That's why we want Microsoft France to be the startups and VC's best friend.
What are the benefits for a startup?
The most precious asset of the IDEAS program is the Microsoft Technology Center, in Paris. A place where startups can make software architecture design sessions, stress tests, POC, benchmarks, etc...
This year our MTC Software architects (and their 200 servers) dedicated up to 10% of their agenda to IDEAS Startups. Companies like Seemage or Keeneo receive most of their clients at the MTC.
Then it's a virtuous circle. We observed that our technological caution brings partners, clients, and investors in faster. Most of the IDEAS companies, like Miyowa, Excentive or Brainsonic are on the fast track, doubling or tripling revenues every year.
So far, 2 IDEAS companies went out of business, but that's part of the game, since we bet very early.
Do you know how many have been funded by VCs?
Of course, we measure this very precisely. Almost 30 startups out of the first 50 have raised a first VC round, since entering the program. For an average of 3M€. The lastt one is Bluekiwi, who just raised 4M€ from Sofinnova.
VCs recognize the value of the Microsoft technological platform and ecosystem and we spend a lot of time talking strategy and roadmap with software-friendly VCs like Elaia Partners, Partech, I-Source, Xange, and AXA.
We also want to identify and connect with all potential business angels with a taste for software investments. We believe there are a lot of opportunities on the French market right now.
Can you ame a few of the ones that we should watch for?
Companies like Seemage, Criteo, Excentive, Miyowa, Skyrecon, Sparus, Tellmewhere.com, Total Immersion, Open Portal or Bluekiwi Software are definitely ones to watch.
Thanks for the interview!
You may recognize Codorniou's name from a post we did last year on his book about how Kelkoo went from research project to a half a billion Yahoo acquisition target based on its European price comparison business, which is how we got to know him in the first place. He has a blog called Codor
Posted at 05:42 PM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
Glowria Raises €6.1M Internal Round
Glowria, the Netflix-clone for Europe and VOD white-label vendor has raised €6.1M from exisitng French investors, reports Neteco. Glowria has partnered with FNAC and Neuf Cegetel in France for VOD and has about 35K subscribers to its DVD business, says the report.
It will be spending this investment money without its founding CEO. Mihai Crasneau who we ran into in Paris on our last visit has recently parted ways with the startup's board. We don't know what he will do next but he is an Internet and new media entrepreneur with operational smarts: he led Glowria through several acquisitions, cross-border expansion, and important studio deals. Our bet is that it won't be long till he starts another venture, or a startup like Joost recruits him to put his talent and experience to use.
Posted at 05:21 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink