Kauppalehti reports that according financial data published into the government files, the price Sulake paid for the acquisition of IRC-Galleria a while back is 12,5 million euros. The company behind IRC-Galleria is Dynamoid, where the Finnish serial entrepreneur Taneli Tikka has also gathered some experience.

The price was 6,6 times their annual revenue which at that time was 1,89 million euros and 25 times their earnings of 500 000 euros.

Openbit, a Finnish Tampere based provider of on-device payment and DRM solutions for mobile applications, and Tanla Solutions, Indian telecommunications software and services provider have announced today that Tanla buys 85 % of Openbit for $US 15.81M / EUR 10.2M in cash. The valuation is therefore at EUR 12M, 23.5 times Openbit’s EBITDA (EUR 0.51M) from the fiscal year 2007.

The remaining 15% is still owned by the management and will be acquired by Tanla in two parts, 5% after the first year and 10% after the second. Openbit has been one of the fastest growing companies in Finland in terms of revenue growth, ranking third in the Deloitte’s Finnish Technology Fast 50 list of 2007.

Seems like a potentially very good match for both companies. Openbit should be able to expand their channels and partners faster in Asia and North America, and Tanla gets extensive foothold in Europe.
Congrats to Openbit for the work well done so far!

See Tanla’s press release (PDF) for more information.

We wrote about CompanyCube back in March, when they were doing business as normal. I checked my e-mail this morning to find a press release from Christoffer Landtman, the CEO of CompanyCube, to announce that they have been acquired by SteelTeam, a steel trading company. CompanyCube will become a subsidiary of SteelTeam in June.

With the acquisition CompanyCube has halted marketing and selling of their CRM and trading solutions. They continue to develop their steel trading solutions, but look for strategic partners to address other industry segments such as plastics, oil industry, wood, paper and the financial industry.

Christoffer and Jussi Alamäki, the current management team will move towards new challenges.

Congratulations from the whole Arctic Startup team to Christoffer and Jussi, a magnificent job!

The largest commercial television channel MTV3 has acquired Kuvaboxi, a photo sharing service developed by Futurice - according to M&M.

The photo sharing service evolved from a mobile photo sharing product called Mobshare developed in 2005. With Mobshare, you could upload your photos to an online service to share with your closed friends, avoiding your photos getting indexed by search engines and being available to the public. Mobshare could be used with a photo blogging service called Futublog, which has now been shutdown.

Kuvaboxi joined the MTV3 portal in March 2006 and since then has become one of the most popular photo sharing sites in Finland (not counting IRC-gallery and similar type of services). Currently Kuvaboxi has over 170 000 registered users and over 5,3 million photos. Following Kuvaboxi’s ride has been close at heart as I wrote my Master’s thesis back in 2005 to Futurice on how they should market and approach mass markets with their service.

Tekes announced yesterday the opening of Playfinland.fi presenting Finnish companies to the world. Target groups are international media, potential partners and investors abroad — and anyone else interested. The site is produced and funded by Verso - Vertical Software Solutions program of Tekes.

Tekes highlights that in 2007 the amount of financing allocated to the Finnish game industry was thirty times more than the amount of similar funding granted generally in the EU last year. The Finnish game industry is known for many original innovations, as well as high quality products, including both games and related products like 3D graphics technology.

There has been a lot of activity in the M&A sector in the last few years as well, some examples being ATI buying mobile graphics technology company Bitboys, Nvidia acquiring 3D graphics specialist Hybrid Graphics, and a bunch of mobile gaming companies sold to foreign companies. Unfortunately, for the most part the Finnish firms have been on the selling side of the table, mostly attributed to lack of capital available for expansion on their own.

Those interested can also join Play Finland Facebook group, which has been created to connect both Finnish and international players in the field.

More on Playfinland.fi in the press release.