Mediatonic Management has closed a 5 million euro fund that will begin to finance games and media products from Finland. The fund has been set up by investments from Fennia insurance, Henki-Fennia insurance as well as the Sonera Pension fund. People behind the fund include Tanu-Matti Tuominen and Marko Tulonen.
The fund is a project and catalog fund that will invest in commercial games, television formats and web services. The fund does not invest into the companies in the manner a venture capitalist would invest, but into the rights of the products and services sold. Therefore the fund’s business model is to take a commission from cash flows generated by the products and services sold.
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Swedish university students are to begin using a near field communication payments system (NFC) developed by payments processor Payex and secure mobile solutions specialist Accumulate.
For this, PayEx along with existing investors have invested US$2m of venture capital in Accumulate. The money will be used to further develop Accumulate’s mobile payments and mobile security business.
20,000 students are expected to be enrolled on the system by the end of this year, with a total of 100,000 students at a number of universities going live over the next six months, beginning with Uppsala University and Linköping University.
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As Swedish private equity company Scope has invested a whopping €7m in a Finnish company Footbalance System Ltd.
The investment will enable the company to further accelerate the growth and sales of its custom insole concept (see videos below). The solution is sold through Road Runner Sports in the US and Intersport International Corporation in Europe. Here’s a more in-depth take on the investment from Technopolis.
Footbalance’s solution is a 100% customized insole, which it creates through its computer-aided foot analysis and in-store production units. Footbalance’s concept is also a means for sports stores to increase their service level by helping the estimated 75% of all consumers who suffer from incorrect foot positions, such as overpronation and supination. Footbalance insoles support ideal foot and ankle alignment while preventing and correcting malpositions.
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Eqvitec Technology Fund III has invested a hefty 26 million Swedish Kronors (about 2.55 million euro) into Voddler, a Swedish startup looking to disrupt the way we watch movies at home. Hadar Cars, a partner of Eqvitec will join the Voddler board with the investment. This is great news for the whole ecosystem as consumer internet had been a little less active in terms of investments in the recent quarters. Also, another sign of this investment for the ecosystem is its size, if there is potential – investors are willing to invest and with Voddler’s 26 million Kronor investment it has been proven.
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Finnish VC Inventure has invested 2 million USD into Finnish mobile publishing platform firm Conmio. The financing will be used to support Conmio’s international growth and product development. Conmio sees many opportunities for expansion due to the strong demand for mobile services. Conmio’s target customers include media firms, device manufacturers and other companies interested in providing mobile solutions to their customers or end users.
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The Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström, who recently left Google (see our previous story here), has joined Xiha Life’s board. Both Jaiku founders, Engeström and Petteri Koponen have switched into the dark side, namely after founding several companies of their own, they have now moved into investing in new startups.
Engeström has started to do angel investing in a chosen few companies, while Koponen co-founded Lifeline Ventures, one of the Finnish Vigo accelerators (see more on the Vigos here)
This might not seem like a big deal, but it is. Finland has been suffering from a deficit of investors that believe in and understand the consumer Internet. Just recently we wrote about the state of the Finnish venture capital and the picture was quite clear: We need more entrepreneurs that have succeeded in the consumer internet to share their experience, inspire(!) and invest in the young guns who want to reach for the stars, but don’t have much more than a boat load of energy to start with. Jyri, along with Petteri, are clearly on the right path.
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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.
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While presenting at the MindTrek Launchpad competition in Tampere (Finland), LinkoTech CEO, Tero Salonen, just announced that the company has closed one 0.5 million US dollar first round funding for its Dazzboard product, and is in the process of closing the other half of the round, totaling to 1 million US dollars. The 0.5 million investment comes from Finnish investors.
Dazzboard is branded as an ‘Open iTunes’. Dazzboard wants to become a non-proprietary, web-based personal portal for storing, organizing and sharing (via different of social networks) songs, photos, videos and other media content.
We have our worries with the product and the experience, but I’m happy that Dazzboard team has found believers that are willing to invest in the company. Congrats to the team!
Two Finnish startups, MySites (see our previous story here) and Dazzboard (see our previous story here) announced recently that they will partner up: MySites which has completely rebranded itself as ’social cloud storage’ is now offering Dazzboard users (as well as everybody else) unlimited amount of data storage for free.
We talked to both, MySites and Dazzboard CEOs, to get to the bottom of what is happening with the services and what the co-operation is all about.
MySites, for its part, is going head on againts services like Dropbox or even Mobile.me, which are cloud storage services primarily for consumer use. Ramine Darabiha, MySites CEO, emphasized that “MySites is going for the social angle. Not just a file service, but the best way to share files while you’re on Facebook and on Twitter.” Darabiha adds that “MySites is aiming to be the most Facebook friendly cloud storage service by integrating with many Facebook features such as friends and commenting to name a few”.
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A Swedish mobile technology startup Mobile Sorcery has gotten a Series A investment of undisclosed sum a second round seed investment of 1.5 million Swedish Kronor (around 145.000 EUR or 206.000 USD)(Correction: the actual investment was a lot bigger, “a proper A round”, yet the exact sum is undisclosed) from MySQL founders David Axmark and Michael Widenius, and STING (Stockholm Innovation and Growth) Capital private equity fund. Majority of this round’s investment came Axmark and Widenius, while for STING this was the second investment in Mobile Sorcery.
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Via Venture Partners, a Nordic venture fund, is to invest € 2.65 million in
Swedish mobile marketing company PlusFourSix. PlusFourSix offers the mobile telephone as a marketing tool, making it possible for clients to create a mobile initiative for their marketing, without having to invest in expensive infrastructure.
According to Niklas Stålberg, the new PlusFourSix CEO as of 1 August, the money is raised to speed the company’s expansion in Sweden and across the Nordics.
Anders Lindqvist, Partner in Via Venture, has been appointed as Chairman of the Board and Mattias Danielsson has joined the Board of Directors. Mr. Lindqvist says that mobile marketing is one of the fastest growing media channels with an estimated annual global growth rate of over 40 percent. We agree with cautiously, as its much easier to loose brand equity with badly designed marketing than gain paying customers. Regardless, PlusFourSix is the leading supplier of mobile marketing technology and solutions in the Nordic region.
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Fruugo has burned through 14,5 million euros in 2008, according to an article in Kauppalehti. Last year’s books show (in Finland these are public for all limited liability corporations) that Fruugo’s net loss for the year is 14,5 million euros and with no income, this is the investment Fruugo used in 2008.
Fruugo is the much debated startup from Finland that has gathered a lot of media attention in the recent year. One of the reasons they have done so is their attractive and well known board members that include Risto Siilasmaa (Founder, F-Secure), Jorma Ollila (former CEO and Chairman of Nokia) and many others. Fruugo’s main product is a webshop that would aggregate all the different webshops into one.
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Frosmo, a Finnish based skill gaming company, has secured an angel round from highly distinguished investors and individuals according to Kauppalehti. The size of the investment round has not been disclosed, but the investment round included 6 individuals; Risto Siilasmaa, Hannu Vaajoensuu, Kirsi Eräkangas, Markku Toivanen, Jarkko Veijalainen and Klaus Berner. Kauppalehti tells that the investment will enable the company’s strong growth overseas – so it is a relatively large angel round.
Frosmo is company developing a browser based skill gaming service, very much like that of King.com – the world’s largest and most popular casual skill gaming community. Frosmo’s main markets are in Eastern Europe and Asia – not the most common country’s of operations for a Nordic company. Nevertheless, Eastern Europe has been a growing market for casual games in the recent years.
Frosmo has some 40 000 players daily. While their main site may not be the fanciest of sites on the internet, they tailor their service to customers through partners. In Finland they have partnered for example with MTV3 to host their service TopKani.fi which is a lot more user friendly and attractive.
I had a chat with Ramine of Mysites over the easter holidays and took our video guru Teppo with me. We shot a small video interview of where MySites is now headed and what they’ve been up to in the last months. There’s quite a bit of interesting stuff that Ramine goes through in the videos, but I’ll also sum them up here. Ramine also told us that they have secured another financing round from Germany, which he talks more about in the video.
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