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November 23, 2007
Warburg Pincus Invests in Spectraseis
Zurich-based Spectraseis announced this week hat it has raised Sfr 36M (US$ 32.5 Million) from Warburg Pincus in a deal that sees the investor acquiring a "significant minority stake" in the geographical surveying technology company.
It is active in a market that has proven to be lucrative for venture capital investors with some good sized exits this year.
The four year old company has developed an imaging and detection system to map oil and gas reservoirs more effectively, cleanly, and at lower costs than existing systems. Earlier investor, StatoilHydro Venture Capital maintains a stake in the company, together with Spectraseis' management team.
Your alarm:clock euro reporter first wrote about Spectraseis back in 2003 when co-founder and CEO Ross Newman had a prototype, some fresh R&D, and a pitch he was making to investors at the European Tech Tour and b-to-v's Investorenkreis conferences. (No links because back then we wrote subscription-only publications)
In the meantime, he attracted early investors, and today his company has customers like Petrobras, StatoilHydro, Pemex, as well as operators in the Middle East.
Warburg Pincus will get two board seats with the deal.
Hot Sector
The growth stage investor might be hoping that it will achieve another homerun in the oil and gas sector with this one, like it did earlier this year with ElectroMagnetic GeoServices (EMGS), which it floated in Oslo at €1.5B plus valuation.
We've been scraping together information on this year's largest VC-backed exits-- by hand, we might add because we don't have access to one of the well stocked databases, like VentureOne or MergerMarket, which are available for deeper pocketed press organizations -- and so far our research shows that two of the largest VC-backed exits are indeed in the same sector as Spectraseis, namely MTEM (a Scottish Equity Partners homerun) and the aforementioned EMGS.
Posted on November 23, 2007 08:36 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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