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August 31, 2007
Viadeo Raises Another €5M
French business social networking startup Viadeo raised $5M from local investors AGF and Ventech [ via DeutscheStartups]. The three year old venture raised a similar amount last year from the same investors.
The startup has gone international since this reporter first looked at its then all-French website. Viadeo currently has about 2M members, about half of which are in France, says Neteco and has raised €10M in total prior to this round.
Growing across borders in Europe is not as easy-- or as cheap -- for a business-oriented social network as it is for ones that cater to our more basic instincts, it seems.
Based on the public information about Viadeo, it is spending about €5 for every new user and has a couple of revenue streams: subscription to its premium version and it also charges for ads on it classifieds platform.
Neteco reports that the capital is for Asian expansion and there are plans afoot to make some acquisitions in that part of the world. It is currently running a publicity campaign in the UK that pitches to potential users to join as a way to "manage" their Internet reputations.
Read - Job seekers must keep 'NetRep' in tact (hrzone)
Read - Viadeo Leve Encore (neteco)
Posted at 06:57 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
DailyMotion Raises $35M and Other Fresh Euro Deals
Advent Venture and AGF Private Equity joined early investors Atlas and Partech in a new round for France's DailyMotion, a video clip and sharing platform. The €35M deal news was reported by the WSJ behind its firewall but covered by Techcrunch and GigaOm's NewTeeVee for the rest of us.
Alawar Entertainment, a casual games startup, has sold a minority stake to Russia's Finam Investments, a deal that Yakov Sadchikov, founder of VC-backed Quintura alerted us to. The size of the investment was not announced but it will be enough to make some acquisitions of local design studios and add some revenue generating features to the games, the firms said.
View Alawar
M&A
Wind River said it acquired Comsys S.R.L., an embedded software consulting firm in Romania, for $1.4M. Founded in 2000, Comsys currently has 52 employees. The startup which has been supplying Wind River with its expertise in embedded systems for automotive and aerospace products was bought for its talent. The founders are Cristina Segal and Luminita Dumitru.
View Comsys
The UK's Telcogames, a global publisher, developer and distributor of mobile games has acquired Sydney, Australia-based Viva La Mobile a multiplayer games developer for mobile devices that has sold content to Asia Pacific cellcos to the tune of over 1.4M paid for multiplayer game sessions, it said. No disclosure on the deal size.
Read - Telcogames : Next Gen, Windows Mobile & Symbian games for your mobile phone - (telcogames announcement)
Posted at 06:35 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
UK's SolarCentury Taps Good Energies and Zouk
The sight of silvery blue slices of photovoltaics clamped onto homes, hillsides, and office buildings has become a lot more common since your alarm:clock euro reporter moved to Europe more than a decade ago. And it is a trend that is going to continue -- at least that is the thinking behind the latest fundraising for a UK-based solar and thermal panel design and installation company Solarcentury Holdings.
It has raised £13.5M ($27M) from Good Energies and Zouk Ventures, joined by Vantania Holdings and Foursome Investments, along with existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners and the utility Scottish and Southern Energy.
The company targets residential and commercial projects and is doing £13M in sales annually. It hopes to expand beyond its home market.
Images like these are becoming a lot more common in this part of the world.
View - SolarCentury
Read - UK Solar Firm Raises (environmental finance)
Posted at 06:07 AM | Posted to Alternative Energy | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Optical Back In Again - Latest is Syntune With $7.1M Second Round
Established optical startups continue to attract venture after several years of being out of favour. The latest is Syntune AB, which has raised $7.1M, in what looks like an internal second round financing. The startup that develops lasers components for use in telecoms equipment raised the fresh capital three years after its similarly sized first round.
Other investors who participated in the round were Teknoinvest, Vision Capital and existing private investors [via Tornado Insider].
This deal is one of several in the past year for optical components and subsystem deveopers, as the optical networking components and equipment suppliers market gets into recovery mode.
Looking at the a:c euro's archives you'll see that CoreOptics, InTune, Xelerated, and Transmode, all Euro startups, have raised fresh capital in the past twelve months.
Recent announcements by Syntune suggests that demand is growing for the type of lasers it makes and it has signed up CyOptics whose equipment expedites the manufacturing of Syntunes agile light tuners.
It is commercializing laser tech that was developed in one of the European Commission's R&D programs - one of its co-founders was involved in 6 of them, but the really interesting thing is that Syntune's founders also worked together before this venture in a startup called Altitun.
During the last venture cycle, the acquisition of Altitun by ADC for $872M gave its VC backers a homerun on an 18 month investment, if memory serves. One of those backers was InnovationsKaptial.
Read Optical comms market poised for recovery (EE Times Europe)
Posted at 04:04 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 30, 2007
Berlin's ViiF Gets VC for UMTS Mobile Video Fun
Berlin-based ViiF.de announced that Neuhas Partners, along with local business angels, and the IBB, have invested an undisclosed amount to seed it prior to launch of a new mobile video service [via forderland].
Its plan is to deliver a mobile video publishing platform that sounds promising, at least for folks with a German area code.
Neuhaus has a couple of successful investments from the past in the mobile services area so they will have brought that to bear on this decision.
But you don't have to be an industry insider to grasp the need for something easier to use than what we have today. UMTS mobilephones that deliver a faster mobile data experience are more affordable now, thanks to telco subsidies. But sending and sharing photos and clips is still a frustrating exercise in getting the right configuration for the service.
There are some alternatives we've tried via downloaded client or via the operator's portal but our experience with those hasn't been that great. This startup says it enables easy video tagging, annotation, and sharing without the client software and via a 4 digit access code.
If it really works at speed and with high volumes of users, then it will likely be popular. This also is the kind of thing that you could take international.
The question is how will it make money. The startup has not said yet but we'll keep an eye on it.
View viif.de
Read - Viif Receives Funding
Read - Finanzspritze
Posted at 05:01 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Lagardère Shops For Two Online Ad Agencies
France's Lagardère has bought two French online ad firms this week: it bought ID Regie and Nextedia. Lagardère paid $67.97M for Nextedia. Nextedia made a gross profit of 9.7M Euros and EBITDA of 1.7M Euros. Lagardère had also bought the US-based and auto focussed online ad network Jumpstart.
Read - announcement
Posted at 05:13 AM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
August 29, 2007
Dutch Investor Marcel Boekhoorn Takes €16.5M Stake in Voice.Trust
Marcel Boekhoorn M&A said today it has acquired a majority stake in venture-backed VOICE.TRUST for €16.5M. We assume it is buying out some of the startup's early investors, but the press announcement didn't make that clear. (We will update if we hear differently.)
The voice biometrics startup has been in business since 2000 and has been selling its technology for integration into password reset systems for authentification.
The Dutch newspaper Telegraf, which actually reported the news last week if the date is correct in the online version we looked at, says that the company had a turnover of €6M last year and that its new backer expects the company to breakeven within the next year or so.
A subsidiary in Dubai, UAE will be established to service the Middle East / Asia Pacific region, which Boekhoorn M&A said it will support, as well as extending its operations to the consumer market for especially mobile payment applications.
Read - Telegraf article on Boekhorn deal (Dutch)
View- Voice.Trust
Posted at 06:39 PM | Posted to Biometrics | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
BridgeCo Raises $17M and Other Fresh Euro Deals
BridgCo Raises More Cash
BridgeCo has raised $17M in venture debt from ETV Capital, along investment by existing backers. The Swiss audio streaming enabler is meeting its projected growth figures. It has some design in wins. One we know of is Denon, according to a separate release. ETV Capital joined all of BridgeCo’s existing investors, including Advent Venture Partners, Balderton Capital (fka Benchmark Capital Europe), Cipio Partners, Earlybird Venture Capital, Fidelity Ventures, Intel Capital and Wellington Partners.
View Bridgeco
Read - BridgeCo's D Round (alarm:clock euro)
SportMe Raises Further Early Stage $ from Mountain Partners
In an intro to a video interview with SportMe.de Gruenderszene reports that the Frankfurt-based social networking platform for sports enthusiasts has gained new investor Mountain Partners. Its early backers include Oliver Jung, Alexander Artope and Econa AG. There are a few sports socnet coming online, as we posted earlier this summer.
Read - Sports Socnets On the Rise (alarm:clock euro)
Platinnetz funded
Holtzbrinck has invested in a venture also backed by the European Founders Fund (Samwer brothers), a social network for baby boomers.
M&A
France's iPlanto Acquired
Strasbourg-based iplanto has been acquired by Infoblox out of California. No disclosure on the size of the transaction, but the French startup was just 3 years old and had been making inroads selling its IP address management software to enterprises using Microsoft, Cisco, and VMWare's products. It had taken an investment of about €300K from a local strategic investor and some €200K in grants.
Posted at 04:49 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 27, 2007
South African Mobile Banking Fundamo Funded For Growth
South Africa’s Fundamo raised €3.7M (R36M) from HBD Venture Capital last month. (We are still getting caught up on the news from over our summer break). It will use the capital to expand into Africa, the Middle East, Asia Pacific regions and the USA.
It has Gemalto as a reseller, as well as recently announced agreements with integrators in Bahrain, the Far East, and Brazil.
HBD is an investment vehicle that belongs to tech entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth who sold his startup to Thawte to Verisign for $575M during the last venture cycle, a deal that rocketed him into space (read his blog bio for more on that) .
Shuttleworth typically invests in early stage but he said that this one satisfies other criteria like having a 'passionate' entrepreneur at its centre.
The a:c euro notes that Shuttleworth has seed funded several startups and he is currently running Canonical, the company that is offering services related to the open source Unbuntu (linux) project.
The mobile banking and payment solutions company, which has filed patent papers for some of its tech, is almost ten years old and is profitable, according to local press reports. MyDigitalLife says that the value proposition for Fundamo in developing markets, is it enables more people to have remote banking and payment services. In developed markets, convenience is the pitch.
Early backers are Venfin and Sanlam, who also joined this round.
Read - Mobile banking for the masses (mydigitallife)
Read - Fudnamo funded (itweb.co.za)
Read - Shuttleworth’s VC company backs Fundamo for further growtht (Fundamo)
Posted at 08:22 AM | Posted to Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
Mojowatch: PlayerX,Crytek, Canonical and Digital Bridges
alarm:clock euro correspondent of the first hour, Valerie Thompson, put together a Euro startup headline newsmakers list, a Mojo list, this weekend.
Mojo Won
Player X, a mobile games and entertainment startup is in the news with a business model that apparently enabled it to grow sales by 179 percent last year last year, which put it in the top 5 category in a ranking of VC-backed ventures by researchers at Library House.
It was the only mobile entertainment company in the Top 20, said Library House, but online trade pub The Inquirer, which has covered the news from several ventures in the list, challenged that conclusion in its report on the Player X news.
It also pointed out that tech is still hot with VCs and not as out favour as the research firm had suggested.
The three year old mobile games aggregator and distributor was founded by a couple of former Digital Bridges (I-play) executives and is backed by a syndicate that includes Nordic Ventures and Arts Alliance.
View - Playerx
Read Player X in Top 5 fastest growing firms (the inquirer)
Read Interview with Tony Pearce, co-founder of Player X (GamesOnDeck)
Read a:c euro funding news post
Crytek is a bootstrapped ego-shooter games studio out of Germany and it is in the news because its founders told reporters that they will move the company elsewhere if government regulations on violence in games gets any tigher on title developers.
Crytek recently signed on with Electronic Arts for a new title with a rumored €16M budget. Its first hit game was Far Cry, which according to trade publication Heise.de, sold 2.5 million copies, at €45 euros each. But The Federal Department for 'Media Harmful to Young Persons' blacklisted the first Far Cry version and Crytek subsequently toned the game down. Heise also says that the Frankfurt-based company employs a staff of about 130 from 27 countries.
So far the three founding brothers have resisted investments from VCs and the like, revealed a Morgenpost interview. They've got their eye on being independant, an IPO is possiblity, but they also said that getting bought by EA wouldn't be bad either.
View - Crytek
Read - Heise.de: Largest German video games developer threatens to move (heise online)
Read - Spiele-Genies drohen mit Auswanderung (Berliner Morgenpost)
UK-bsed Canonical, which was set up to handle Ubuntu customer support deals with computer manufacturers, is in the news with complaints about the evidently closed BBC i-player, and news related to the announcement that Dell will sell in Europe Linux PCs supported by Canonical (yearly support contracts). The startup is led and backed by Mark Shuttleworth, the South African born, London-based entrepreneur.
Read - PC Manufacturers Embracing Linux, Sort of (daily tech)
View Shuttleworth's blog
Mojo Lost
Digital Bridges, a $100M M&A deal with Oberon was still not enough to make its investors wealthy, says the Scotsman. The early investors were 'hit' says the paper.
Read - Tycoons face big hit as games firm proves a bridge too far (The Scotsman)
Posted at 06:26 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 24, 2007
Danish Attention-Metrics Startup Raises $2.7M And Plans For $10M Round
Copenhagen-based software startup iMotions Emotion Technology A/S, has attracted a couple of more business angels to a $2.7M round that also brought back most of its earlier backers, 95 percent to be exact. [via Tornado Insider].
The startup develops the software that lets users do something useful with data from an eye-tracking system - in this case they apply it to market research for advertisers and brands that want to test where a viewer's eyes go when looking at an ad or image as well as their 'emotional' response to it (we're not sure how that bit is measured).
It has raised a total of $3.7M and is growing its sales organization. It plans to raise a $10M to $15Mround in a year's time, it said in a statement.
i-Motions uses eye-tracking hardware from Swedish startup Tobii, which is another startup we follow.
The new investors are Mads Kjaer of Kjaer Group, and Casper Foghsgaard, an executive at a Danish biotech enzyme company Novozymes.
Early investors are InVenture Capital A/S, Kenneth Morse, of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center; marketing and PR man Andy Miller, of Miller Consulting Group; and Jørgen Thorball, a VP of bizdev at Novozymes A/S.
View - i-motions
(Read: our coverage of the first i-motions round ).
Posted at 09:38 AM | Posted to Advertising | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 23, 2007
Aito's Funded To Improve Cellco's Return per Customer
Aito Technologies raised a first round from Conor Venture Partners. No disclosure on the size. It doesn't reveal much about its technology or business model on its site but from statements issued by Aito, it is targeting mobile operators and service providers with software solutions that enable the users to "segment their customer base more accurately, analyze the adoption patterns of new services, and reduce support calls".
It is a solution that will integrate "realtime customer behavior" with hitherto separate information and service management systems in the telcos.
Posted at 07:07 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
August 22, 2007
Sweden's EPiServer: A CMS Business Model That The Money Likes
Amadeus Capital Partners and Northzone Ventures, together with Peter Larsson (founder of Protect Data, mobile security tech startup acquired by CheckPoint for $585M last year) have acquired a majority stake in EPiServer, a Stockholm-based web content management platform developer.
They paid $23.5M for the equity and Larsson will join the company as CEO.
A couple of things made us follow up on this announcement. It is a later stage deal for two VCs known for early stage. EPiServer was founded in 1994.
And it's a content management software deal. Yes there's a lot of spending on webdev these days - the last time we looked even Intershop was growing sales again - but there are already about 1300 CMS firms in the market, so why this one?
And the third reason is Peter Larsson who will return to the fray with this one.
More insight into the latter two was given to us by Jeppe Zink, of Amadeus in a phone interview. More on the first observation we will save for another post- fact is, it's a trend among many, but not all, of the tech-oriented European VCs that recently raised new funds.
Zink anticipated the question about why a CMS company (you can imagine him pitching the deal to Amadeus senior partners). He acknowledges that it is a fragmented market where most of the money is made in services.
The industry average ratio he gave us was 1 to 5 (for every one product dollar there's five dollars for services).
This startup sells to developers, over a thousand. It does not do direct sales. It does not get involved in the service side, which is where the majority of rivals generate sales, as mentioned before.
The company's business model enabled it to acquire 1500 customers with a sales and marketing team of less than five people and it has a greater than 20 percent margin on sales, according to Zink.
It grew developer end user numbers during the downturn, according to its website we note.
Nevertheless, its partners page suggests there is plenty of room to grow in countries beyond the home region.
According to its partner FAQ, it provides its platform, guidelines and training (certification) to developers and channel partners for a fee and leaves the rest to them. There is a module trading exchange too.
In summary, for the investors the technical and business model risks are out of the way. Zink said as much in the interview: "The challenge now is to scale the business, while adding more next generation, or Web 2.0, functionality".
This is where Larsson will contribute. He was brought to the syndicate and the startup's helm by Northzone. "EPiServer has the same model [as Larsson's previous company]. It is a different market, but the same business model," said Zink.
View Episerver
Posted at 09:39 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Web 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
France's Actimagine To Raise Capital - Going International
We reported that Actimagine had raised venture capital last year from GRP Partners, the US venture firm that backed Starbucks, among others. We kept it on our radar ever since.
The four year old Paris-based company develops a software codec or vector graphics-in-a-small footprint technology -- enables users to put DVD quality movies on a mini memory card for mobilephones, running various operating systems, without having to run for the recharger, for example.
In the meantime, it did a deal with Adobe a few months later. Today it said in a statement that sales grew from €1.4M in 2004 to €5.2M last year, and it is now planning a new round of finance.
The startup recently appointed Henri Linde, the Thomson SA executive that built up that company's MP3 licensing business, to head up its US operations.
Read - Erfolg zeichnet sich aus: Video-Codec-Hersteller ACTIMAGINE wächst und gedeiht (pressebox)
View Actimagine
Posted at 04:23 PM | Posted to Digital imaging | TrackBack | Permalink
Actionality Bought By Yahoo (Updated)
Updated: Yahoo confirmed to ClickZ today the acquisition of German mobile marketing company that was backed by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. We called to confirm the deal with its venture capital backer in the meantime who declined to comment but sent us the quote on the acquisition that was issued by Yahoo. (This post also corrects the typo in Actionality's name that appeared in the initial alarm:clock euro post).
Both confirmations were in response to a report in Mobile Entertaintment Biz about the transaction. There is no official word on when it took place or the size of the transaction, yet.
Founded in September 2002, Actionality sells consumer brands and global advertising networks targeted, interstitial mobile marketing campaigns, specifically inserting ads into games, across Asia and Europe. The startup claims access to the game catalogs of numerous mobile operators. Actionality was founded by CEO Scott Cullinane who was with Earlybird Venture Capital for 5 years.
Read - Mobile Entertainment News
View - site
Posted at 06:30 AM | Posted to Advertising | TrackBack | Permalink
Early Stage Money: Gamersprofile and Jobleads.de
The alarm:clock euro's reporter, Valerie Thompson, is still trying to get caught up with the news that flowed during her summer vacation, as well as interviews with Kevin Lomax, Misys founder, and Nick Ogden, Worldpay, founder. In the meantime, she has a couple of early stage news from Germany to report.
The HighTech Gruenderfonds has invested in Jobleads, which is launching a job and referral platform for executive types. It is in beta and only in German for the time being but HTGF sees a "scalable" business that has a good founding team. Two of the founders are former investment bankers and its chief techie hails from OpenText, the Canadian enterprise software company.
A Blognation Germany review of the startup suggests its competitors are Zubka and H3. There's also Experteer, which targets your better paid jobs too. It's also German and backed by BV Capital and Wellington. According to Clemens von Bergmann of the HTGF who let us know about the deal by email: "It is kind of like the Zubka model in the UK but much better," he wrote.
Read - Jobleads first round
View Jobleads
Munich-based GamersClub, which recently launched a social network called gamersprofile.de, raised an undisclosed amount of capital from Mountain Partners (an investment company majority-owned by former smartcard entrepreneur Cornelius Boersch) and Tiburon (an investment vehicle that belongs to getmobile.de founders Tim Schwenke and Daniel Wild).
gründerszene » Gründer-Rückblick - Interessante Themen der letzten Woche (Gruenderszene)
Posted at 05:26 AM | Posted to Early stage | Media | News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
Cognimatics: From Face Warp To Face Counting
What’s a startup team to do when it realizes that getting its software into smartphones, despite the giddy predictions of market research firms and investment banks, is not the fast track to growth?
The answer, stay lean, don't raise VC, and try another market – at least that’s what Swedish startup Cognimatics is doing.
The four year old company was founded by the same team that founded Decuma, a handwriting recognition for PDAs startup, founded in 1999 that raised VC (probably from too many investors leading to unaligned interests, we can guess) and was sold off to Canadian company Zi in 2004 in an assets sale.
The founders learned a few things from that experience and run Cognimatics as a self-financing venture. A couple still work as professors at a Swedish university.
They first targeted cameraphones as a way to commercialize their cognitive vision tech, which is a geeky term for software that can do useful things with images captured by a camera's image sensors.
Its product, Face Warp, has a design-in win with a mobilephone manufacture and that business generates most of the sales. Its installed base is 50M terminals, Håkan Morän, told us in a phone interview, and the plan is to continue to grow that part of the business.
Face Warp Your Cameraphone Pics (image source: Cognimatics)
Moran is the sales and marketing chief, and joined the founders a year or so ago. In the interview there was no disclosure of the name of the phone manufacture, but your a:c reporter did a little research and learned that SonyEricsson sells its phones with face warp software pre-installed - we assume it's Cognimatics'.
Without the outside money, the startup is very customer-focussed and realized a couple years ago there's demand in retail, selling its patented tech to surveillance camera and display manufacturers for use by retailers that want to know where to position products, and how many people entered the shop or where they went, that is, people and face-counter applications.
This is the market opportunity it is now addressing. It already has signed up customers to apply the tech in electronic surveillance camera and into digital displays. But the company still has no plans to raise outside capital, despite offers, according to Moran.
"Self-financed and organic growth is the strategy for the time being," he said.
A Face Counting package from Cognimatics
Now a retailer can know how many people look at an advertisement for an instore special, for example, and match it with sales. By moving the display around, they can get some numbers to better decide the right location for an ad or what type of ad gets people buying.
We think it is onto a good thing with this retail application. We recall that last year Experian bought VC-backed FootFall for £35Mpre-empting a planned IPO. It was into electronic customer monitoring, which is tracking shoppers. The fact that the company was about to float and that Experian bought it beforehand, suggests that there is some growth ahead for businesses developing this kind of product.
Your a:c euro reporter has seen a lot of startup teams underperform with this kind of computer vision technology over the years, especially research lab spinoffs. But Cognimatics has avoided the security camera market boondoggle, entered the mobilephone one, and is now positioning its technology in another promising one.
Read – Axis camera announcement
View Cognimatics
Posted at 04:57 AM | Posted to Advertising | Early stage | Emdedded Systems | TrackBack | Permalink
August 21, 2007
Beneq Raises €3M For Coatings LEDs
Beneq, a Finnish startup that develops reactors to apply so-called functional coatings on metals, glass, and ceramic has raised €3M [via Unquote.com] from Via Ventures, a Danish venture fund, and Inventure, which is a local fund (formerly known as Holtron Ventures) that has invested in some names you'll recognize like MySQL, Fastrax, and Xelerated.
The startup, whose tech creates films that measure in the nano range, has some traction, as the VCs say. It reportsseveral contract wins for equipment to apply anti-tarnish coatings. And earlier this year it started in the lab to develop processes to coat semiconductor wafers, in particular substrates for GaN LEDs, the kind that industry uses to make high-brightness blue lasers and white lights. The venture received an earlier funding round from Inventure.
Read Beneq's news
Posted at 03:45 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment | TrackBack | Permalink
Games Domains Startup Spill Group Attracts Backer For Better Biz Model
Dutch games-oriented website operator Spill Group has raised an undisclosed amount from the Van den Ende & Deitmers's Crossmedia Fund [via Tornado Insider ] for a “substantial minority” stake in the company.
Spill Group’s business model is morphing from generating web traffic for advertisers to one that might be more lucrative. It has been acquiring better content and also has contracts to run affiliate marketing campaigns for the likes of the Habbo Hotel (Sulake Labs). Deals for casual games from higher quality casual games are getting done, while the startup also builds a portfolio of its own titles. It recently acquired Hispanic game traffic domain Juegos.com
To get an idea of the kind of money companies like Spill group make just on the traffic generation, we can look at Virtual Network SA, which although smaller serves up some interesting numbers.
Back in 2005, this reporter posted on a predecessor to the a:c euro that the Nyon-based firm said profit climbed in 2005 to SFr 1.7 mln (EBITDA) on annual sales of Sfr 5.8 mln, up from SFr 1.2 mln on sales of SFr 4.2 mln in 2004. It has a 30% margin on sales. It runs several popular web-sites for the French speaking part of Switzerland and recently sold a stake to Edipresse, an international magazine and book publisher out of Switzerland.
Posted at 03:37 AM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 20, 2007
Euro VC Fund News - Eden Ventures and Neuhaus With Oman Fund
We know you need to know where VCs are investing, but it is also useful to keep up with who has new money to invest and what the investor types are up to.
UK early stage venture capital fund Eden Ventures announced that it had closed its new (and first) at £75M, which was above its target. It took them a good two years to get there after announcing an initial first closing.
Although it is a first-time fund, the team has been investing as business angels together for years. Eden's most recent claim to the top tier is its return on selling Cramer Systems to Amdocs.
We've got some of its portfolio firms like Truphone, VoiceVault, and Apertio in our news archives, but we also note some more recent Web 2ish investments like online user reviews site Revoo; Volutio, the company behind IKordo, which it says is a personal organizer, and online storage startup, Mobyko; and Exabre which recently launched The Filter, a music playlist site that exploits its recommendation tech.
Hamburg-based Neuhaus Partners is named to manage a €100M venture capital fund that will invest in Oman-based companies, reports the Times of Oman, and several other local press sources.
Posted at 06:15 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Venture Capital | TrackBack | Permalink
Premiere Invests €10M in VC-backed Auction Startup 1-2-3.tv
Premiere, the German pay-TV broadcaster, acquired a 14.4 percent stake in VC-backed 1-2-3.tv, as Der Spiegel first reported last week. It is not clear to your a:c euro reporter if it was a capital increase or buying old shares, but DowJones later confirmed the transaction, reporting that it was a €10M deal. (via visavis ).
Our calculator says that’s a €69M valuation for the three year old TV auction startup, which had a turnover of €67M last year, and has raised at least €32M in two rounds. It claims 500K customers participating in its daily dial-in consumer product auctions which are broadcast on cable and satellite free channels and on its website. Premiere will now also be adding the channel to its ‘bouquet’.
The venture has Munich-based Wellington Partners, 3i, Target Partners, and Iris Capital backing it.
Posted at 05:48 AM | Posted to Media | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 16, 2007
Accel Takes Stake In Browser-based Gameforge
Deutsche Startups is reporting that the London arm of Accel has taken a minority stake in Germany's Gameforge, a developer of browser-based multiplayer games. It also says that it was a minority stake.
The Karlsruhe-based company has some 'traction' as the VCs say, claiming 6M active players and 40M users in total on its games (with a number like this the company has a reach way beyond Germany as it is half the population of the country), which would have put the founders in a good negotiating position.
Like some other browser games out of Germany that we are familiar with, players are willing to buy tokens that enable them to move up to higher levels in flagship title „OGame" faster.
Harry Nelis from Accel said in a statement he has had his eye on the company for a while now.
Read - Accel Steigt Bei
Posted at 07:25 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 15, 2007
GoalUnited Funded For Browser Games
Browser-based games are big with the kids, and some of them are mighty addictive, so it is not much of a surprise that investors are starting to put some money in that direction. Today we received the news that the High Tech Gründerfonds, along with ICS Holding, have invested an undisclosed amount in Hamburg-based Northworx Software, the startup behind GoalUnited, a browser-based football sports manager game.
The game's sites ( 8 languages on various int'l domains) host training sessions, matches, rankings, and tournaments which apparently keep users coming back for more.
You may recognize the ICS name, its principals Sven Schmidt and Daniel Grözinger, are experienced Web and online service entrepreneurs, and recently founded (and are managing) new-style ecommerce startup site Dealjaeger.de and the quickly popular verwandt.de, a family roots site, which just raised capital from business angels and Neuhaus Partners to go international. The verwandt.de board is actually going to be recruiting a new management team for that venture soon, Schmidt informed us today.
The Northworx/ GoalUnited.de is a minority holding of ICS (the majority is still owned by management and HTGF owns a minority stake).
Northworx Co-founder Sascha Kaddatz said in a statement issued by htgf that his sites are serving 100M impressions a month to a good 300K users.
What makes this venture particularly attractive to the moneymen, according to the same source, is that it has a software development platform, geekily dubbed njin, for 'rich media' browsers games -- in addition to a hot game.
View GoalUnited
Posted at 02:36 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Used Car Site 1bib.com Taps German Investors
Used cars are almost as hard to get as driving lessons in mainland China, so 1bib.com based in fast growing Guangzhou has good prospects with its online platform for trading autos. It has just raised capital from Germany's Econa, the Berlin-based early stage investment vehicle that has backed German webcos like Getgo, online ticket sales site acquired by CTS Eventim in 2002, and OpenBC/XING, now publicly traded.
Back in March we noted that the Shanghai'd blog from Marc Van Der Chijs had some early stage startups profiled, including 1bib.com.
View econa
Posted at 08:55 AM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
August 14, 2007
Digital Chocolate Acquires Barcelona's Microjocs - Its Second Euro Buy
Digital Chocolate, the California-based pureplay games startup founded by Trip Hawkins - and backed by Sequoia and KPBC (among others) - has made its second acquisition in Europe, with microjocs, a Barcelona-based startup [via Carlos Blanco blog].
Microjocs is an imode, WAP, and J2ME games developer and publisher that was founded in 2002 and it employs 20 in Spain.
In the same announcement the US startup said it had also acquired assets from Bangalore-based Small Device Mobile Technologies. No disclosure on the size of the deals.
Small Device is known for its mobile application porting ability, according to Digital Chocolate, which will enable it to triple its capacity for such work.
This is the second Euro deal for Digital Chocolate. Back in 2004, before the company announced raising its first round VC, it bought Sumea, a Helsinki-based mobile games startup. The number of employees at that studio has grown 328 percent and still employees all the original co-founders, said Digital Chocolate in the statement.
Read - Digital Chocolate Expands Global Footprint with New Operations in India and Spain
Posted at 05:44 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Scottish Startup Raises £1M For TV Signal Shifting
In early stage news today, Scottish Inxstor has raised £600K from Braveheart, the Scottish venture capital angel network, and backed by the Scottish Co-investment Fund, according to The Scotsman.
The new money will be used by the Dunfermline-based company to expand its product development programme and its technical team. It raised seed funding last year of about £400K.
The startup is a spinout from Infinite Data Storage, another Braveheart portfolio firm, that designs portable data storage devices for the consumer electronics market, says the press report.
The Inxstor website is not loaded with information, but from the reports we read, it will be delivering tech that supports Tivo-like television viewing, but it is calling it place-shifting rathern than timeshifting. It says it "allows the user to watch TV shows they usually receive at home" in any location on devices other than TV sets (such as mobile phones)."
That would mean you could get your pay per view tv channels on the road, we guess. There is copy-proofing and signal-stealing-prevention tech in there too -- the press reports mention DRM -- so that makes us wonder if you would have to pay more to the service provider for the privilege of watching something on a different box than the one you are already paying for.
Read -Inxstor Finds Place
Read - New funding takes Inxstor past £1m
Posted at 07:45 AM | Posted to Interactive TV | News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Reuters Chief Says Socnets Not A Bubble
In an all things digital interview with Kara Swisher (Boomtown blog) this month, Reuters group chief, Tom Glocer, said that social networking is not a bubble - in response to her questions about what's the biggest hype in Internet-related news today.
We don't normally quote the chief execs of the information industry here, but for our readers who have a stake in the category, and for 'bubble' watchers, Glocer's comments fit the bill.
About 5 minutes into the interview he begins to talk about how Reuters sees social media and the things that industry participants are still trying to figure out (e.g. monetization).
From the little bit that Glocer said, Reuters is looking at customizing news for individuals, or a community of interest - news alerts on what people need to know if they are diagnosed with cancer, or what is the current danger level at the airport you are going to be landing in next week.
Unfortunately, the talk digressed too quickly to learn if the effort will involve acquisitions, or starting up a new venture capital fund, which would have made this post a bit more relevant.
The Blackberry Curve-toting (the Curve is the RIM smartphone with Qwerty kybd) executive's informed answers to Swisher's questions about the trends make us speculate that he has Mashable in his RSS reader, or a subscription to the media stream on StrategyEye from MarketClusters, in addition to his company's experience with new platforms.
Read - Reuters builds an Enterprise 2.0 social networking community for their clients on the new Blogtronix 2.0 Platfrom and Reuters to start financial MySpace.
Go to - Kara Visits Reuters Tom Glocer
Posted at 06:43 AM | Posted to Media | TrackBack | Permalink
August 13, 2007
PE Firm Buys 3rd Mobile Entertainment Startup In Russia
Moscow-based private equity firm Marshall Capital Partners has bought a controlling stake in Russian mobile content provider Nikita Mobile. The press release does not disclose the amount paid but experts cited in Russian daily Vedomosti estimate Nikita Mobile is worth between $10M - $40M. Marshall is working a regional roll-up having previously bought Solvo and Jump, which operates in Russia and the Ukraine.
Read - Cellular News
View - Marshall Capital
View - Nikita
Posted at 08:47 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | TrackBack | Permalink
Dutch Wireless Audio Startup Raises First Round with UK's Kennet
Three-year old Wireless Audio IP BV, which develops wireless audio modules and audio chips, has raised $6M its first round from Kennet Partners, the later stage UK-based VC firm.
Marketing its products under the name STS, the company was founded in 2003 by Reinier Winter and Hans Van Leeuwen. Its product deliver "uncompressed audio" to wireless headsets, speakers and iPod docking stations.
The company wants to get its technology into DVD systems, portable audio docking systems, amplifiers and speakers to enable them to handle wireless. It has offices in Singapore and Silicon Valley to support that goal.
Some design-in wins are what attracted the investor, so the press release suggests. That and the fact that it got this far without VC also made it one for Kennet's portfolio.
Two board seats for Kennet are part of the deal, occupied by Michael Elias and Eileen Tanghal.
View STS
Posted at 07:10 PM | Posted to News And Updates | TrackBack | Permalink
Enigmatec Raises $12.5M For Data Center Management SW
Enigmatec, a UK startup that sells data center management software ( buzzword is Run Book Automation or RBA), now has a heavy-hitting tech founder as an investor in addition to VCs, according to its announcement today where it said it raised $12.5 million (£6.25 million) in series ‘C’ financing.
Expansion plans will be funded by the new money. Enigmatec has raised $30M since Amadeus seeded the venture back in 2002.
The latest funding round included current investors Amadeus Capital Partners and Pentech Ventures out of Scotland, with additional participation from Herald Ventures and Kevin Lomax, formerly the executive Chairman of Misys. Both new investors will get a board seat. Lomax is executive chairman.
The early investors our regular readers will be familiar with. Misys you will recall is one of Europe's larger software companies and is more than 25 years old. It was founded by Kevin Lomax and is publicly traded out of the UK. It employs 6,000 people with turnover in excess of £1B, according to Digital Look. Its market cap is £1.2B.
Lomax recently stepped down from a dual role of CEO and board chairman.
Herald Venture is a UK only VC fund that typically puts in new capital rather buying out existing shareholders. It will generally take a minority stake and seeks a board seat too.
View Enigmatec
Posted at 05:40 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Software | TrackBack | Permalink
B2B Portal Mercateo Taps Local Investor for €1M
Munich-based Mercateo AG, an e-procurement platform with about 270 vendors, has raised €1M from BayBG Bayerische Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH to staff up its software development teams.
Target Partners, a German VC, has been backing the company since 2004 after it was acquired from early investors by management in an MBO.
Mercateo did a little over €23M in turnover last year, as we reported back in February.
Read - Mercateo Expecting a:c euro
Posted at 09:55 AM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
August 12, 2007
Sweden's Cellpoint Acquires Gennum Unit
CellPoint Connect AB, a Bluetooth headset specialist has acquired some audio signalling technology from Canadian chip solutions company Gennum Corporation for an undisclosed amount. The Swedish company makes lightweight earware.
Read- press rel.
Posted at 08:10 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | TrackBack | Permalink
JumpTV and Getupdated Do Some M&A
Canadian Internet TV broadcaster JumpTV says it has acquired web only cycling sport broadcaster Cycling TV based in the UK for about $5, reports dmwmedia.com. Just last month the London and Toronto listed company also bought XOS Technologies Inc., for $60.25 million in cash and 3 million retention warrants for employees
Sweden's Getupdated, an Internet marketing and SEO company, is expanding internationally with several acquisitions. It announced last week its purchase of Florida-based eTrafficJams. No disclosure on the size of the deal. Earlier this year, Getupdated acquired French search engine marketer OptiWORDS.
The acquisitive Swedish company is owned by Eastpoint, which is listed on OMX in Sweden.
Read - Internet Marketing Company Getupdated Officially Acquires American EtrafficJams
Posted at 07:30 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
August 11, 2007
The Daily Mail Pays ₤10M for JobsGroup.net
One of the hottest areas for buyouts in the UK has been older media companies buying online job boards. The latest is the Daily Mail which has bought JobsGroup.net portfolio of Web sites for ₤10M ($20.2 million) plus a three-year earn-out.
JobsGroup.net sites include:
* JustEngineers.net
* JustRail.net
* JustConstruction.net
* Just4Aviation.net
* JustUtilities.net
* DefenceJobs.com
* Just4Finance.net
* JustSalesandMarketing.net
* Just4Executives.net
* Just4Graduates.net
* JustTechnicalJobs.net
* JustForums.net
* JobsinaBox.net
JobsGroup.net calls itself the UK’s largest independent operator of niche job sites. Established in 2000, JobsGroup.net recently won Best Online Service at the Recruiter Awards for Excellence 2006; Number One Site for Placements for the third year in the OnRec Top 100; Finalist for both Innovative Online Marketing and Best Technical Innovation at the OnRec Awards 2006; and Finalist in the Best Specialist Jobsite category at the National Online Recruitment Awards (NORA) 2006.
View - site
Read - PaidContent post
Posted at 10:54 PM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink
London's PNMSoft Raises $3.3M For BPO Software
London-based business process management software developer PNMsoft has raised $3.3M from Goldrock. The company claims 200 client wins.
Read - Globes story
Posted at 10:17 PM | Posted to Financial Software | TrackBack | Permalink
August 10, 2007
Diino's Internet Desktop Play Gets Swisscom Money
The Swedish company behind Diino, an online storage, email, file sharing, and other hosted services, attracted a €2.3M investment from Swisscom earlier this month. The deal gave the Swiss telco a 25% stake in the venture. Early investor, Novestra, a Swedish publicly traded investment firm, retains a 52% stake in the venture.
Diino has about 120K user who get 2GB of free storage space, and the use of a lot of useful applications too, like backup, email pooling, blogging, and photosharing. Its implemented some ultra-security features (and claims more than a dozen patents). The service requires the user to download the Diino client (it can be run from a USB stick for users that want or have to use public PCs). There's mobile phone support too.
Diino is run by Bytek Systems AB which was founded in 1998. Its CEO is Dani Duroj who was appointed back in 2004. Before that he was CEO of XTP Online AB and GroceryPartner.com.
Swisscom is buying itself some front row seats at startups that provide services that may help the telco go beyond being a carrier and mobile services provider. It usually invests a relatively small amount in startups like this.
Other recent startup participations by Swisscom include Kyte.tv (broadcast yourself), which after raising capital from Holtzbrinck in Germany and Swisscom, also took on money from Nokia Growth Partners in June, CoComment (blog widget) and Whisher (Wifi home network sharing ) in Spain.
Posted at 04:59 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Online services | TrackBack | Permalink
Irish Intune Gets A $17.75M Optical Deal
Irish VC investment may down this year but it is not due to the lack of promising companies in the region, nor a lack of stock market stars in its recent tech past, as the Irish Independent illustrated in a recent feature story. You could also just ask the syndicate of London VCs that backed Dublin-based Intune Networks latest $17.75 round, namely Amadeus Capital Partners, Balderton Capital and Spark Capital. (via SiliconRepublic.com)
Or ask the partners at Atlantic Bridge, the venture fund that invested some $16.2M into GPS chipmaker Glonav, and who've been talking up its growth in the East Asian market, or ask the Canadian investors that took a stake in the fabless semiconductor upstart Redmere Technologies, one of the companies that this publication's reporter of the first hour, Valerie Thompson, has been following.
Founded in 1999 by John Dunne and Tom Farrell, Intune is an optical transceiver developer that recently recruited Tim Fritzley, a former Microsoft IPTV executive, as chief executive.
Intune is commercializing its laser tech by developing components that it says meet the requirements for IPTV service providers
If you are into optical components, then the buzzword is ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop
Mulitplexors). As we read it, Intune has developed optical transceivers that support ROADM, which is what the telcos are using for the transport layer below Ethernet/IP for delivering IPTV and interactive services in their networks.
Balderton's George Coelho said in a Silicon Republic report on the deal: “The demands of the consumer have evolved significantly over the past decade and the requirement to deliver diverse, high-quality content in real-time is paramount to the success of the fixed-line telecoms industry. This presents an exciting opportunity for Intune. We are delighted to be involved with Intune and share their vision for the optical networking business.”
Early stage capital for Intune Networks was provided by Bank of Scotland (formerly ICC Ventures), Enterprise Ireland and angel investors including Chris McHugh and Leonard Donnelly.
Posted at 07:01 AM | Posted to Hardware | News And Updates | Semiconductors | TrackBack | Permalink
VC Scarcity For Irish Tech
Ireland's ability to attract VC investment has been waning in recent months based on what we've seen in reports from the likes of Tornado Insider and VentureOne. The Irish Venture Capital Association (IVCA) confirms the trend in a recent statement noting that Irish technology companies raised €62.6m in the first half of 2007, down from €83.7M raised in the same period last year.
It is worth noting, however, that the number of deals actually increased, suggesting there's more capital to be ..
It is worth noting, however, that the number of deals actually increased, suggesting there's more capital to be raised as these ventures start to grow. In fact the IVCA is hosting an event for entrepreneurs this Fall with local venture funds, such as ACT Venture Capital and Delta Partners on hand as speakers.
Slowing the market down is the scarcity local venture funds. The local VC sector has yet to raise a lot of new money post-bubble.
As we've noted before, raising VC funds in Europe is a tough sell but things might change in Ireland if more follow the path of Trinity, the investment fund that recently floated portfolio company Norkom Technologies in London. This summer it took the unusual step of raising €50M of new money on the stock exchange. SiliconRepublic.com: Trinity raises €50m in IEX and AIM flotation
If you are asking yourself how just one or two small sized VC funds can move the stats, then the answer is that the tech VC market in Europe is so thinly funded that, especially in smaller markets in like Switzerland and Ireland, even a small amount of new money can move the needle on the dealometer.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, our observations suggest that with new money local VCs are able to source deals again in their markets where there is pent up demand. The effect of the new money is greater because they bring in co-investors, often from abroad, to boost the size of the deals and fund a greater number of new ventures. In the meantime international VCs are picking up some of the slack.
Posted at 05:52 AM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
August 09, 2007
London Is Startup City But Berlin Is Climbing
Europe doesn't have a center for VCs and founders like Silicon Valley, but it does have some hotspots. Problem is they are not always in the same place, as the latest stats from Dutch venture database publisher Tornado Insider reveal.
In its weekly newsletter Tornado reports today that Germany moved up to second place for attracting venture capital investment in 2007, edging out France which has been number two to the UK's number one of late.
City-wise, London is still the hottest with 8.2% of all deals and Paris is number two, but the surprise is that the German capital, Berlin, climbed up the ranking to the third spot from 8th with 3.5% of all deals in 2007 and fourth place was snagged by another German city, Munich, with 3.1%.
Hamburg-based venture fund Neuhaus Capital is doing some deal sourcing in the region, we hear, so we asked Neuhaus' Paul Jozefak (babblingVC) why the city is attracting founders and their backers. "It's the cheapest place to set up shop and easy to get people to move there. It's cheap living, lots of "action" meaning the under 40 crowd is easy to relocate there, and internationally it even has status, " responded Jozefak. (Image source: germany-tourism.de)
We have reported good-sized rounds raised by Berlin-area ventures in recent months, such as Snom Technologies (VOIP hardware), Nanotron (Wireless Sensor Networks), along with several smaller rounds for growing Web startups like myphotobook.de, qiro, and dawanda. The M&A activity in and around Berlin is probably encouraging investors' choices (See a roundup here)
Tornado Insider also listed cities that are losing out in 2007, such as Cambridge (2.1% in 2007; 3.1% since 2000), Dublin (1.4% in 2007; 3.1% since 2000) and Stockholm (0.9% in 2007; 2.9% since 2000).
While the UK and London have secured the most deals with 30.6% of all technology investments this year, said the Dutch venture data publisher, Germany topped France raising 16.7% to France's 11%. Israel held steady in fourth place with 8.7%, followed by The Netherlands with 6.3% in 2007.
Posted at 06:58 PM | Posted to Being European | TrackBack | Permalink
August 06, 2007
Viagogo Raises $30M With Eyes on US Market and Stubhub
We have been tracking the loser leave town battle for the European online ticket sales market which pits Viagogo vs. Seatwave and of course eBay's Stubhub.
Seatwave raised an $8M B round with Atlas who brought in Mangrove Capital. It has been one-upped by Viagogo today which has just closed a $30M in a 3rd round. Viagogo was formed by StubHub co-founder Eric Baker. Backers include Index Ventures, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, German media man Herbert Kloiber and financier Jacob Rothschild. Viagogo has now raised $50M to date. Interestingly, it plans to use the new funding to enter the U.S. market. So Baker is both going to make a small fortune from the sales of his Stubhub shares to eBay and compete with eBay on its native soil? That's ballsy.
Says investor Danny Rimer at Index Ventures said, "The U.S. secondary ticketing market is stagnant; innovation both on the service side and the consumer experience side has stalled. As co-founder of Stubhub, Eric and his team understand this market implicitly and are well-positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. Viagogo has quickly become the leader in Europe and is now poised to disrupt the U.S. market."
View - site
Read - Press release
Posted at 09:37 PM | Posted to eCommerce | TrackBack | Permalink