While there’s no shortage of negative news these days, here’s a dose of positive news from Manish Madhvani, Co-Founder and Partner at GP Bullhound. With offices in London and San Francisco, the investment bank is focused on technology and digital media. So far this year they’ve closed five transactions and probably will be closing another one in the next few weeks.
A lot of GP-Bullhound’s deals have been in the internet sector: „There is a trend that the internet is still performing“ says Manish „the key message is that there’s capital out there for the companies that are delivering and getting traction. One of the deals we’ve closed recently is with a company called Greetz, a pan-European player in the greetings card market. They are starting to see some good sales uptake - that’s why there was a lot of interest in funding the company. Another company we worked with recently is online fashion company Private Outlet. They kept on growing throughout the time we worked with them. It’s key to prove that the business model is working.“
Manish points out that „the capital will be there for the people who put in the work". He advises: "Go to conferences like this, build a network and talk to people who know the market. Personal contacts are crucial – we are always going to trust the business plan of someone that we’ve worked with before more than a ‚cold e-mail’“. Manish wraps up his interview with Viktoria with another dose of positive news: „There’s a saying that all the great companies are built in a downturn, because you have cheap office space and people on the market that you would never normally get access to.“
Click here for an overview of all interviews from Red Herring 100 Europe.
Posts Tagged ‘Red Herring 100 Europe’
Despite the current downturn, venture capital firms continue to raise money and invest in startups at a healthy pace. In his interview with Viktoria, Maximilian Bleyleben - Managing Director at Kennet Partners explains why from his perspective as a technology investor the investment market is alive and well: “The important thing is that most of the big tech trends are far stronger and will last much longer than any recession. We have made five investments in the last four months: In BuyVIP – one of Europe’s leading private shopping clubs – as well as in Spreadshirt, a German business where you can personalize t-shirts online. We also invested in the Danish video advertising firm GoViral and in two US companies.”
As a growth equity investor, Kennet Partners focusses on finding businesses that are either bootstrapped or raised only small amounts of capital and already built themselves to five or ten million euros in revenues: “We look for wherever there’s growth. We’re pretty agnostic which sectors that comes from – certain niches within e-commerce or SaaS. If there’s a transaction to be done we do it, if not we develop relationships for the future. Sometimes it takes one or two years before the timing is right for a company to raise money” explains Max.
Max thinks it is crucial for entrepreneurs to finetune little features about their business as they bootstrap it with an eventual investment in mind – things like the working capital cycle or getting paid before suppliers have to be paid. One of the reasons Kennet Partners likes to invest in Europe is that there is tremendous diversity of talent in Europe “with lots of engineering talent that needs to be unlocked” Max says. “If you bring American commercial practices, sales skills and internet online lead generation skills to these European technical innovations you can build really strong companies and in this day and age where the company base doesn’t really matter anymore there is no reason why Europe cannot build the same winning companies as the US.”
Click here for an overview of all interviews from Red Herring 100 Europe.
Software Made in Germany: In his interview with Viktoria, Michael Beck from Divolution proudly presents the company’s testing and targeting technology. “We provide our clients with analytics tools that profile user behavior on a website and automatically optimize a website depending on the user behavior” says the founder and CEO of the Detmold-based startup. Divolution has a unique position in the German market and has won more than 50 new clients last year, ranging from e-commerce, finance, travel and telco websites to online media and advertising companies.
Divolution’s technology can be combined with every website, infrastructure and content management making a quite high ROI: “One euro invested in our technology brings you more than five to fifty euro back” Michael points out. Depending on the client’s business model, Divolution gets commission from the revenue uplift or charges a page impression based license fee. So far the SaaS provider reached all its milestones and will start looking for potential new investors at the end of 2009 in order to can go international with their services.
Michael’s startup advice for entrepreneurs is to always observe the market: “It’s crucial to identify your USP and to develop a good sales pitch. Then set up a good sales team and focus on sales.”
Another latecomer from Red Herring 100 Europe that is worthwhile watching will be posted next Wednesday. Click here for earlier posts from Red Herring 100 Europe.
Remy Wilders finds that „we're done with browsing, it’s time for Web jogging“ so he founded JogTheWeb.com which launched only four months ago: „The whole idea is to take your visitor by the hand and lead him through the pages that can be of interest to him“, explains the CEO „what we are trying to do on the internet is like what we have in the real world – you have books and magazines which is in fact a bunch of pages all related and linked together and the user doesn’t have to wonder on each page ‚where do I go next?’. He just turns the pages.“
JogTheWeb uses Tracks which are like bridges between the sites that bring the audience nearly mechanically from one site to another: „The site will be able to lead the way and show what the user wants but also show other items that the user can click, pick and put in his basket. Once he’s gone all through the store, he’ll probably be buying a lot more“, believes Remy. The French startup has many different clients, but teachers and classical publishers are obviously a huge market for the company.
Remy says JogTheWeb is using three business models: „ We’ve sold for instance for BNP Paribas using a license model which was very interesting. But we also have a free model where any site can have the service set up within nearly minutes – the only thing is that we can put publicity in their Track and use their audience to finance the service. The third business model is for sites who want to have Tracks but don’t want publicity. They are going to pay with a CPMT – cost per mailed Track – which is €2,50 for a thousand Tracks shown.“ JogTheWeb has been helped by the French Agency for innovation OSEO and hopes to be even by the end of the year.
Please note: All of Viktoria’s interviews from Red Herring 100 Europe can be found here.
Helena Torras is Partner and Interim Manager of Spanish cloud computing platform abiquo.com: „Abiquo offers open source software that allows companies to create and manage complex IT infrastructure such as virtual servers, networks, storage, applications – but everything together in one click. It’s both very fast and simple and reduces time to market. You open the service when you need it - as soon as you don’t need it anymore you close it and pay on demand“ raves Helena.
Hosting providers can sell the time in which one company doesn’t use the server to another one, so they can get efficiency. Furthermore, abiquo software enables companies to create their private cloud and link it with the public cloud of Amazon Web Services. Abiquo’s core product allows you to create and manage the cloud for free - premium license with increased trustability, statistics, billing as well as outer scale has to be paid.
Helena, who had been a consultant for eight years, entered abiquo together with „some other business angels“ in 2007 because „we liked the vision“. She believes that „now is the time of cloud computing and we have to accelerate it so we are dedicated full time for abiquo. Helena argues that cloud computing has profoundly changed information technology because it allows you to pay for what you need and what you use.
Cloud computing undoubtedly created a new paradigm, but does it also endanger liberties and makes users dependent on the cloud computing provider as its critizisers say?
Learn more about cloud computing by watching Viktoria’s interviews with Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels as well as with Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services. More interviews from Red Herring 100 Europe will be published here in the days to come.
Although Dutch rapper Frank Schuil - who’s also CEO and founder of IRL Connect - didn’t want to rap spontaneously, Viktoria’s interview with him is definitely worth watching: IRL is a 2009 Red Herring 100 Europe winner as one of the most promising and innovative technology companies in the EMEA region as well as one of the most actively discussed posts on Techcrunch Europe.
„We created a web-centered visual social network that allows you to see on Google Maps what your friends from several social networks - including the mobile social networks - are doing and enables you to interact with them“ says Frank, „it’s about tapping into graphical experience for the user and creating location awareness on the web.“ Frank points out that „every social network today knows that it has to open up to grow and become part of the social ecosystem. Only the mobile social networks are creating walled gardens on the mobile again - that’s why a lot of them run into problems. By having this web counterpart they have a way of opening up again.“
In order to monetize its products, IRL Connect applies on the one hand a B2C model where they sell map real estate. On the other hand they have a B2B model where the IRL interface and the visual social networking experience is applied to the business environment: „It allows you to see where your employees are all over the world and you can interact with them. It is also a way to engage in conversations with your costumers“, explains Frank. IRL Connect is closing partnerships with the existing webplayers to really enable the centralized platform it is aiming for. To secure new growth opportunities, it plans to partner up with mobile social networks.
Further interviews from Red Herring 100 Europe will be published here during the next days.