Every Friday we will feature an Investment and aim to break it down as closely as we can so our audience will get an idea of where the money comes from.
Sopima, a Finnish company building an online contract bank that aims to enable productivity improvements into the way organizations manage their contracts secured a €1m funding just a while ago.
Sopima is developed for all sizes of companies to keep their contracts in order, be able to manage all commitments made. As a web service Sopima enables you to do this together with your business partners, regardless where they are located. With Sopima every party has the entire contract constantly at arms length, and thus the contract becomes integral part of the daily business.
We dug a bit deeper to see where a web startup like Sopima would get its funding in Finland.
Business Angels brought in €245K and Finnish Employment and Economic Development Centre and Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation) combined €230K, and Etera, a Finnish pension insurance company €500K. The three angel investors were Jukka Kosonen, Pekka Heikkonen and people behind a Finnish company Dealia Oy. The company raised its seed round from the management team and business angels mentioned above, which created a nice cushion to go after the A-round.
During 2010 and 2011 Sopima will be looking into closing another round of €2m to €5m for international expansion.
Later on, Sopima is also planning on building bespoke virtual negotiation rooms, where the contract can be negotiated and assembled from standard pieces. This means that the company does not have to fly their lawyers into the meetings at all, but they do their job when the contract is put together from the various commitments.
Conceptually Sopima feels a bit like Google Docs living in the cloud, but this time it is a legally binding contract. This should make the whole process of conducting business easier, faster and safer.
Sopima is currently in closed Beta and will be launching during December 2009.
WinWinBooks
Voddler
Arcusys Oy
Congrats to Sopima guys. It is not the best time to raise funding but as they say in TEKES “all the good ideas get funding”.
Thanks Ville for interesting blog post. Personally I don`t think that TEKEs money should be included in “funding round” announcements. If you get money from private investors it is a relatively easy to get public funding.
It is also quite interesting that Etera is investing straight to startup. I guess that kind of organizations usually put their money in VC funds who then invest in startups.
Kai,
Remember this only applies in Finland. Why I brought Tekes in is exactly to shed light into the Finnish system vis-a-vis how other Nordic or Baltic countries work. I think its fair to say Tekes money is part of the ‘funding rounds’ as like in this case they bring in half of the cash.
Ville,the start up is one of the innovations that makes Finland ahead of the pack with its peers like Sweden,Denmark and others.the market is there and its just a matter of time before they are overwhelmed by amount of business they will get.on funding,best ideas will always get funding even if they are based in interior areas of any country.who will not invest in a viable business that has both short and long term benefits at this time of recession where such opportunity are scarce.I disagree that when you get funding from private sector public one can come free and easy.its the other way round.TEKEs should be emulated in other Baltic and Nordic countries as Ville is trying to explain.Its wake up call to angel investors,private and public funding organizations.The weekly review of an investment is long over due and Ville that is a first one.Let copy cats follow but they will never step up to your game.Kudos Arctic start up