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News & Updates - Friday, March 31, 2006

This Week In Euro Tech Ventures

- The a:c euro looks at 4 startups that are sinking their fangs Into cellco margins on voice and data. They are: Hotxt (UK), mAtelplus (Germany), Vipera (Switzerland), and Sofanet (Germany)

- Scatterweb Get Financed. Startups in the wireless sensor network (WSN) market in Europe are attracting early stage funding. The latest is Berlin-based Scatterweb which has raised an undisclosed amount from High Tech Grunderfond, a German state-backed investment vehicle.

- Max Rumpus raises funding from Swiss seed round backer. The company publishes Maxdox a software application used to publish documents on mobilephones.

HP uses MaxDox to produce pint-sized documents for the mobilephone platform.

- Flytxt Raises $2M To Focus On Mobile Ads. A day after learning of TXT4's financing round, we have one of its competitor's Flytxt, also hailing from the UK, announcing that it has raised funds and will focus its business on mobilephone marketing tools.

- Stingray spins out Qinetiq with VC investment. Stingray Geophysical, which makes fibre optic seismic monitoring gear used in oil and gas exploration, raised £6.6M in VC funding.

Permanently deployed on the sea-bed Stingray's waterproof system provides more info to oil companies about hidden or unexploited reserves that existing gear.

- Japan's Index Corp Buys Wonderphone. The startup is a French mobile TV and games distributor. Index has made several acquisitions in the mobile content sector such as Mobliss (US) in 2004, Skyinfo (China), Yarosa (NL), and 123Mutlimedia (France) in 2005.

- Cambridge's Ubisense Raises Funds for location tagging. Ubisense has raised $3M from Cambridge Angels and Cambridge Capital Group. Ubisense was founded in 2002 by four location technology experts from the Laboratory for Communication Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

- London's Empower Interactive gets big $18M round. Empower has seen an 80% increase in revenues for 2005. The company designs messaging and multi-media systems for mobile operators that provide for billing and managing of high volume SMS and MMS applications.

- The London Stock Exchange’s AIM saw one of its largest IPOs as Playtech went public valuing the online gambling software maker at nearly $1B. Seven year-old Playtech began trading at $4.50 per share, raising $55.6M. Playtech has 39 licensees for 94 online casinos, 15 online poker sites, and 15 online bingo sites and its profits have grown to $35.6M in 2005 from $8.3M in 2003.

- Oxford Capital Partners invests £1.25m in TXT4. The company inserts ads in text messaging and estimates the addressable market is worth about £750M.

- MP3 Inventors Look To Fund Cinema Sound Startup. Karlheinz Brandenburg, who holds the main patents for the MP3 format popularized by Apple's iPod, is leading a startup called Iosono, which sells audio processing, mixing software, and speaker systems that afford cinema-goers (for example) a more realistic sound experiences.

Iosono Pumps Up the Volume

- Berlin-based Zanox - an online affiliate marketing company - may be for sale. Estimates are that Zanox is worth between €250M and €350M with a mutliple of 20X net profit (based on the multiples apparently enjoyed by its peers, such as recently floated TradeDoubler in Sweden and CommissionJunction in the US.) Zanox management has told the a:c euro in the past that acquisitions are in its sights. It already completed one in France recently, so an IPO, or a sizable investment by a private equity firm, would fit with that plan.

- London's Zopa Takes $15M To Move Into the US. Zopa is a peer-to-peer lending startup that found surprising intitial success.

- France-based MeilleurMobile.com has just raised €1M from Galileo Partners. MeilleurMobile sells cellphones and accessories.

- Skyrock and Skyblog Acquired by Private Equity Investors. Axa Private Equity has acquired an 80% stake in Orbus, the company behind French radio station Skyrock and Skyblog, a popular blogging platform. A French paper put a €100M valuation on the company.