Posts tagged:

funding

Videoplaza Secures € 3.5 Million In Funding

by Ville Vesterinen, March 18, 2010 — 1 Comment

We all know the Swedish startup Videoplaza has been on a roll lately with their ad serving technology for managing and monetising online video. Venture capitalist are not disagreeing: Today Videoplaza announced the completion of its €3.5 million (US$5 million) round of investment led by Creandum and Northzone.

Not surprisingly, the capital was raised to support a further commercial development and a roll-out across Europe. More specifically, the funding will enable Videoplaza to accelerate the deployment of its Monetizer ad server platform technology for managing, displaying and tracking advertising in and around publishers’ online video content into more European territories, including Germany, Spain and Italy.

Continue reading »

Neo Technology Secures Seed Funding To Lead NoSQL Movement

by Paula Marttila, October 28, 2009 — 4 Comments

I probably shouldn’t be this ecxited, but I am. Swedish Neo Technology, developer of Neo4j, an open source graph database, has secured $2.5 million in seed funding to boost Neo4j’s presence in the emerging NonSQL movement market space.

I just received a happy call from Emil Eifrem, CEO Neo Technology, at the moment in US to talk about semantic web, NonSQL movement and the next step in Neo Technology’s life.
Continue reading »

Here’s how to get funding from Tekes

by Guest Blogger, August 14, 2009 — 15 Comments

tekesJerri Laine is the CEO at Innavation Manager where he helps companies with their Tekes and T&E-Centre funding proposals.

Tekes, shorthand for the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, is publicly funded expert organisation for financing research, development and innovation in Finland.

I have been asked this question dozens of times – as in the past I have been working in Tekes for seven years in evaluating all kinds of project proposals.

Since the year 2000 Tekes has grown to an icon of Finland’s innovation success story and it has had its implications. Tekes’ budget has grown remarkably, it’s staff has been grown and changing and it has got a lot of new norms, instructions and directives from it’s owner Ministry, from internal inspections and of course from EU. In short Tekes has got bureaucratic.

Continue reading »

Mobile Payment Solutions Developer Accumulate Lands VC Funding

by Miikka Kukkosuo, June 23, 2009 — Leave a Comment
Accumulate logoAccumulate, a Swedish mobile payment and security solution provider, received an investment from The Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund (The Sixth AP Fund; Sjätte AP-fonden). The Sixth AP fund is the so called Swedish state fund for long-term risk capital, investing in small and medium-sized growth companies. http://www.apfond6.se/en/
The size of the investment has not been disclosed.
Accumulate had an angel round in 2008 in which Carl Palmstierna, a famous Swedish business angel, and Patric Svanberg invested in the company. Carl Palmstierna is currently the chairman of the board.
Accumulate’s CEO and co-founder Stefan Hultberg comments that the cash will be used in expanding the business of Accumulate’s mobile service platform Flexion and its new mobile security solution, which is in an establishment phase.
The mobile service platform Flexion allows for flexible pricing and license control of mobile applications and games, and is managed by Accumulate’s UK subsidiary. The company has business for example with Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung, and despite strong revenue growth needed new cash for working capital due to the notoriously long payment cycles in the mobile business. Accumulate will also strengthen its operations team. Accumulate claims to have served 6 million end users up to date.
Accumulate’s mobile security solution can be utilized for example for securing credit card purchases and person-to-person money transfers, for secure logins and signing, and enabling payments by mobile phone. The first pilot project is starting next month, according to Stefan. Also an OpenID based solution is coming still this summer. Stefan identifies the banking segment as the most interesting target for the solution, though they can be slow in adapting new technology. In addition, Accumulate is also interested in other industries and especially the enterprise security market. In order to reach the enterprise market Accumulate will utilize a channel sales strategy, having just a couple weeks ago hired a channel sales manager for building up the partnerships.
The press release (in Swedish; here is Google translated version).

Accumulate logoAccumulate, a Swedish mobile payment and security solution provider, has received an investment from The Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund (The Sixth AP Fund; Sjätte AP-fonden). The Sixth AP fund is the so called Swedish state fund for longterm risk capital, investing in small and medium-sized growth companies.  The size of the investment has not been disclosed.

Continue reading »

Mobile Startup QAim’s CEO On Landing Round A Funding

by Miikka Kukkosuo, May 19, 2009 — Leave a Comment

QAim logoQAim, a Finnish mobile startup, has gotten Series A funding from Veraventure along with private investors Tapio Heikkilä and Olli Oittinen (press release in Finnish). QAim focuses on improving mobile services usability. 

QAim will use the funding to finalize the piloting of their CEM4Mobile product and begin the foreign sales focusing heavily on five European countries within the next three years. (QAim has been looking for new talent also through the Job Board on ArcticIndex.) Continue reading »

Tweehouse Scores 350 000 Euro From Tekes

by Ville Vesterinen, February 26, 2009 — 1 Comment

tweehouseTweehouse, a 6 months old Finnish MMO gaming startup that was spun from Valve, has received 3500 000 euro from who else than Tekes, Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.

Tweehouse got the grant to assist in the ongoing development of TrunkTech, an end-to-end technology platform designed to develope games in co-operation with a U.S. based games publisher. With the grant Tweehouse team will be able to grow its current size of nine developers and designers in Finland and additional marketers and producers in Los Angeles, CA. They just got their first game out, Eco-Rangers. A good start, even though according to the team it’s only a mere poke at the market compared to what’s in the plans: The Eco-Rangers was mainly a marketing campaign for Taco Bell in the US, whereas TrunkTech will be published as SaaS (’Software as a Service’) later in 2009 and used as the core engine in buiding of many more massively multi-player applications or even in virtual worlds.

The startup has a rather unusual business model. I quote myself here from the previous post on the company:

Tweehouse will target purely US market in the beginning. For this Snap TV is an ideal partner [for Tweehouse] to handle the Sales and PR and leave the game development and pipeline management to the Helsinki office. Snap TV prides itself for having a dedicated sales force that calls on all classes of retail and ships products to over 20,000 storefronts across the United States and Canada, thus enabling quick access to market when the product is ready.

…

The business model will build on the end-to-end solution. The service covers everything from design, development and marketing all the way to running the platform and moderation of the games themselves. In essence Tweehouse is aiming to build and sell solid gaming platforms to their customers. In addition to a fixed price element, the company also aims to always build an upside to the products they sell. This could mean for example a revenue share model that will be a percentage of each game sold.

As Paavo Perttula of Tweehouse notes, Finnish success in gaming is partly due to the long tradition stemming from the very active demo scene of the 80’s. Along with the demo scene, the Finnish goverment has had an active role contributing to the success as well. In 2007, the Finnish technology fund (Tekes) gave in excess of 6M euros in government grants to gaming initiatives, whereas the combined figure for the whole of the EU was 21M euros. This time it was Tweehouse’s turn to give the international expansion a try, and based on the progress so far they are on schedule. Congratulations to the team and good luck!

Adobe and Nokia Fund New Cross-Platform Flash Concepts

by Miikka Kukkosuo, February 23, 2009 — 1 Comment

Open Screen Project logoAt GSMA Mobile World Congress last week, Adobe and Nokia announced Open Screen Project fund aimed for helping developers create new applications and services for mobile, desktop and consumer electronics devices using Adobe’s Flash Platform. The initial size of the fund is $10 million.

All developers can now submit concepts for new applications. The focus areas are not that limited; you can enter with apps on entertainment, business, social networking, productivity, gaming, travel, multimedia, health, finance, weather, sports, news, education, etc… The requirements are that the applications are based on the Adobe Flash Platform, will run on Nokia devices, and will work on multiple screens, including mobile, desktop and consumer electronics devices. The review criteria focuses on the innovativeness of the concept, appeal of the UI, robustness the application or planned implementation, and how well the application exploits the capabilities and features of Nokia devices, Adobe Flash (including Flash Lite) and Adobe AIR. It is stated in the fund’s FAQ that of special interest are connected applications leveraging core Nokia device capabilities such as camera, location/GPS, and user contacts. The concepts will be reviewed by “mobile and desktop application and services experts” at Adobe and Nokia. Accepted concepts will receive 25% of the agreed financing upfront and 75% upon project completion.

Open Screen Project ScreenshotOpen Screen Project is an industry initiative led by Adobe, aiming to provide consumers richer, more interactive, and more consistent user experience for web content and standalone applications on televisions, set-top boxes, mobile devices and other consumer devices. Adobe has gathered over 20 members aboard so far, including the top 5 mobile phone manufacturers, Intel, Qualcomm, and Verizon. The vision of Open Screen Project is to “Enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere.” The key is to establish a consistent runtime environment across different platforms and environments,  by reducing the fragmentation of devices, operating systems, and browsers.

So far Flash has a wide reach, considering numerous operating systems and devices, and and existing community of over million developers. Adobe is no doubt trying very hard to make Flash the de facto standard of mobile and the new converging web devices as well. Sun Microsystems is challenging Adobe in the runtime race by the introduction of JavaFX framework, which is boasted to provide simplicity and ease of design similar to Flash, but with much more extensive scripting features. Sun is also targeting e.g. IPTV and set top box manufacturers among others with JavaFX. In terms of installed base Flash has gotten a lot of head, though, with stated close to 40 percent of all new mobile devices shipped with Flash Lite in 2008. Adobe also just released Flash Lite Distributable player for over-the-air distribution of Flash Lite applications.

Conformiq Closes 3 Million Euro in Funding, Goes After Global Markets

by Karri Saarinen, February 12, 2009 — Leave a Comment

conformiqDespite the economical climate and the horde of naysayers, a Finnish based software company, Comformiq secures 3 million euros in investment round lead by Nexit Ventures Oy. Funding mainly comes from Suomen Teollisuussijoitus Oy(‘Finland’s industry investment Ltd’) and unclosed group of US angel investors.

According to their press release, with this new funding, Comformiq plans to transfer its business executives to US, but retain the product development in Espoo, Finland. Apparently they are also getting a new CEO, A .K. Kalekos, and former CEO, Antti Huima, will step down to CTO.

Conformiq focuses in model-based testing tools, with their main product Conformiq Qtronic. The real innovation with this product is that usually you would need to write tests, but Conformiq Qtronic generates and executes tests itself based on the design model. A recent study(pdf warning) suggested that Test-Driven Development(TDD) takes 15-35% longer but leads to 40-90% fewer bugs. Conformiq says that they can decrease development time by speeding up the test design by 20-fold.

It’s great to see yet another funded software company that breaks free from the arctic blizzard. As myself, I see the software industry as a something what we arctic dwellers could really excel in global scale. Hopefully more great people and funding find this sector.

Social Music Marketplace gogoyoko Raises ISK 100 Million

by Miikka Kukkosuo, February 12, 2009 — Leave a Comment

gogoyoko logoDespite of the downturn and bad overall economical situation in Iceland, the new social music service gogoyoko (see our previous intro)  has secured 100 million Iceland Kronur (slightly more modest in euros: EUR 0,69M; USD 0,89M) in funding from Icelandic The New Venture Business Fund (90 %) and private investor Vilhjalmur Thorsteinsson (10 %).

The purpose of the funding was not disclosed, but in the company’s newsletter it is stated that the firm has been growing steadily and just moved to a bigger office. gogoyoko is still looking for more people and prepares for increasing international marketing activities this year. gogoyoko has gotten advice and steering for the fundraising and  product development process from Norwegian  “New Media Innovation House” Ignitas that also has taken an equity stake in gogoyoko. Ignitas has been previously involved in selling Norway’s #2 social network Biip.no to media enterprise Egmont/Nettavisen.

gogoyoko provides artists and other music right holders a social marketplace allowing them to sell music directly to consumers worldwide without middlemen. The service is currently running in closed beta, planned to be publicly opened in April. gogoyoko’s service is promised to include interesting features like a custom music player embedable to any site through which the users can stream (ad-funded) tracks and albums for free. The player is also supposed to include a music store interface. On gogoyoko’s portal, artists can create their personal sites, write news, blog entries, upload discography, pictures, videos, and enter gig information to gogoyoko’s global map.

The firm’s updated intro video:

Gogoyoko from Gogoyoko on Vimeo.

XIHA Raises Chinese VC Funding

by Miikka Kukkosuo, November 26, 2008 — 3 Comments

XIHA is a Finnish startup developing XIHA Life, a multilingual social media platform and an online community targeted at people living outside their home country, and the multilingual people around the world. XIHA invites users of any language, but adjusts the user experience to each user so that they only see automatically the content they understand. Despite the current economic climate, XIHA has raised a significant amount of risk capital from a Chinese VC.

Jani comments it’s hard to find risk capital in Finland to support global growth. According to Jani the Finnish VC’s thought the risk was too big. Out of the international VC’s Jani thought Chinese were the best, as they have both money and vision.

The amount of investment was not disclosed. However, the amount is rather significant, as the founder and CTO Jani Penttinen says with it the company will open offices in the US, Switzerland, and China, and will hire ten more people, developers and business roles, to achieve 24h global operations. Another ten will be hired later depending on the economical climate. There is also more money coming if certain growth targets will be hit. XIHA has strong Chinese roots due to Jani working in the country, and Jani’s spouse Sun Xiaowen being Chinese. “Xiha” means ‘fun’ or ‘happy’ in Mandarin Chinese, and also ‘Hip-Hop’ in Cantonese.

As of now, XIHA is still losing money, but the goal is to get to profitability by the end of the year. So far the main income source has been downloadable games, but XIHA is planning to expand to other digital products as well. Below is a quick interview with Jani Penttinen from Slush Helsinki.

Jalbum raises $3.2M in Series B funding

by Karri Saarinen, October 16, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Jalbum Ab, Sweden based community for online photosharing, announced yesterday that they have closed a second round of investment with Nordic Venture Partners. This new deal brings the total raised capital up to 23 million SEK (approx $3.2M). In addition, the company’s board of directors named serial entrepreneur Andreas Sjölund as the new Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Sjölund is formerly known as co-creator of Skype and one of the first employees of KaZaA. Founder and former CEO David Ekholm will stay with the company and continue as a CTO.

Jalbum offers a mix of photo album software and social photo sharing. What separates Jalbum from other services like Flickr is that they have executable cross-platform client. Client enables the user to do basic photo editing, organizing and uploading photos. With the tool you can also design own or use some user created pre-existing skins for your album. Another appealing aspect is that you can publish your album where ever you like, not only on Jalbum.net.

Even though the downloadable clients have been regarded as somewhat painful practice, apparently it has worked for Jalbum. The client is now downloaded over two thousand times a day and over 24 million albums have been published with the software.

Funding and Training for Finnish and European Companies

by Miikka Kukkosuo, September 30, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Tekes

Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, offers Finnish companies possibility to take part in the UCLA Global Access Program once again this year. In the program MBA students of UCLA will make an international business plan for the companies as their final thesis, focusing on analysis and action plan for entering specific international markets. The program was ranked last year as the best of its kind in the US, and the bar for both participating companies and students is high. There have been yearly around 10 Finnish companies participating in GAP, including e.g. one of the fastest grown firms Openbit and Cidercone.

EurostarsEurostars is an European funding and support program specifically dedicated to creating competitive SMEs that will be leaders in their own sector. The program tries to ignite international collaborative research and innovation projects by easing access to support and funding for growth companies. The program is initiated by EUREKA, pan-European intergovernmental network founded to enhance competitiveness of European businesses. Eurostars offers 400 million euros of R&D funding to SME companies over a six year period. Tekes funds the Finnish participants with 5M euros per year. The next deadline for electronic submission of applications is November 21st 2008. See instructions from Tekes.

Gaming and interactive media companies can also apply for funding of 10,000-100,000 euros for producing product demos and prototypes in the Media 2007 program. The program is aimed at companies developing on and off-line interactive works. Eligible are interactive works for the computer, internet, mobile phone, games console (including handheld), and digital television, that present a substantial degree interactivity, narrative, and innovation. Companies that submit an application must have completed a previous interactive work, or an animation of at least 24 minutes, and prove that the work has been commercially distributed between January 1st 2006 and the date of submission of their application. The next deadline for applying is November 17th.

Funding to get more difficult?

by Antti Vilpponen, April 9, 2008 — 1 Comment

VC deals going down?TechCrunch reports more difficult times ahead for companies looking for funding in Silicon Valley. Overall, the number of M&As have gone down, as well as IPOs and the total value of disclosed M&A deals. When in US, they report on quarterly figures, we have to settle for annual figures (which are increasingly late as well) here in Finland. Then again, our market domestically is in very early stages (the average size of a venture capital investment in 2006 was a mere 680 000 euros).

While I don’t believe the effects of the downturn have hit Europe yet, I believe they are on their way. Any comments from the field would be appreciated on this topic, like always :)

Best of April Fool’s

by Antti Vilpponen, April 2, 2008 — 1 Comment

Virgle - Virgin and Google combined?There were some very good April Fool’s jokes to be found all around the internet yesterday.

Here’s a few ones we found.

  • Virgle – Virgin and Google, a 100 year plan to take over Mars.
  • Google Docs – Build your own airplane.
  • Arctic Startup – to be honest, not really funded just yet. It was simply too tempting not to post it after I got the idea. However, it wasn’t all that outrageous as Vierityspalkki fell for it as well as som commenters(sorry!). Is there a blog in Finland that has received proper funding yet?
  • Google’s Future Search – search the web of tomorrow.

Which ones did you find?

Arctic Startup secures funding

by Antti Vilpponen, April 1, 2008 — 7 Comments

We’re funded!Being the founder of the blog, I’m very very glad to announce that we have secured funding from two Finnish venture capitalists. The money will be used to hire a full time blogger and expand the services overseas to other Scandinavian countries. We are still in talks of publishing the two private investors in the near future.

We’re thrilled of course, needless to say. However, we won’t be selling this blog so the focus will be kept critical and analytical in the future as well. The blog was started in 2007 with a suspicion that I will have time to continue writing it. Soon it gathered momentum and I had sort of an obligation from the fans and companies to continue on the track I’ve chosen. With this funding I see that our efforts have not been in vain.

A huge thanks to all the readers and companies involved – I’m starting of the day with a bottle of champagne :)