Podio Acquired By Citrix
We've received word that Podio out of Denmark has been acquired by Citrix, a U.S. publicly listed provider of mobile and cloud services. The details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Citrx's annual revenue in 2011 was $2.21 billion, and claims its products are interacted with by 75 percent of internet users every day. Sunstone Capital is Podio's largest shareholder and only institutional investor.
Podio has created a collaborative work platform -- somewhat like Yammer but with apps. Podio enables small and medium-sized businesses and teams within larger organizations to manage all types of business processes and associated workflows using pre-assembled apps from Podio’s free app market.
Danish Startup Community Unified Against The Entrepreneur Tax
Would you start a high growth company if you knew that if you were to make it to exit, the government could levy a 67% tax? Or would you make any early stage investment in a company facing the same rates?
This is the question pondered by Danish entrepreneurs and angel investors looking at the porteføljebeskatning, or portfolio tax. The tax in question targets an additional 25% on any shareholder with less than 10% ownership of a company. This brings the marginal tax rate up to 67% for an entrepreneur exiting a company, and the same rate for an Angel investor investing in what is a very risky asset -- high growth startups. It's high price on Danish entrepreneurship have earned it the perhaps more aptly named "entrepreneur tax" or iværksætterskat.
Finnish Open Ocean Capital Invests In A $5 Million Round To Commerce Guys
Finnish VC firm Open Ocean Capital has taken part in investing to a French company, Commerce Guys. The size of the round is $5 million in total and other investors that participated include Alven Capital and ISAI, the French entrepreneurs' fund. Commerce Guys are the creators of Drupal Commerce, one of the leading eCommerce solutions working with Drupal. Commerce Guys looks to serve internet merchants by helping them leverage the Drupal platform for their online stores. Open Ocean Capital is famous for supporting companies building value on top of open source projects, for example the likes of Drupal.
A Short Update On Prezi, The Zooming Presentation Software
One startup we last covered in 2009 but deserves and update is Prezi, the cloud based presentation software that differentiates itself from the standard office presentation software by zooming in and out of of concepts, rather than the standard forward transitions of square slides. While we don't have any breaking news to give you, we do have nearly three years of updates to catch up on.
Sunstone Capital Leads $1.2 M Round In Berlin-Based Gidsy
Following the news of last month's €85 million closing of "Sunstone Technology Ventures Fund III," Sunstone Capital announced it has led a $1.2 million round in Gidsy, a Berlin-based startup offering an online service where people can discover, offer and book unique experiences. The round is led by Sunstone Capital and is joined by Index Ventures, Werner Vogels, Peter Read and Ashton Kutcher.
Interview With Emil Eifrém Of Neo Technology (Video)
We interviewed Emil Eifrém of Neo Technology about a lot of things. He's the CEO and co-founder of the company and they just announced a nice $10.6M Series A round from Fidelity Growth Partners, Conor Venture Partners and Sunstone Capital. Neo Technology provides NoSQL, graph database solutions to its clients. Their clients are large, very large actually and they've signed on one Fortune 20 company as well.
Podio Closes $4M Round To Grow Sales
Last week, the Danish based Podio closed a relatively large $4 million round in Series A funding. Sunstone Capital led the round. According to Tommy Ahlers, the CEO of Podio, the funds will be used to grow the sales of the company and also finance key hires.
Podio is a new kind of an enterprise software, looking to disrupt how people work. The service has many different features to take an organisations work routines online and ease them with simple to use tools. Podio's tools can be used in a variety of ways - from company intranets and extranets, project management and recruiting solutions, to CRM, business intelligence and company-wide social platforms. We talked to Tommy Ahlers about where Podio is currently and how it intends to grow during 2011.
Microtask Closes A Super Seed Round From Sunstone Capital
Microtask, a Finnish startup, has just closed a round of seed financing lead by Danish Sunstone Capital followed by a group of Angel investors (see list below). The size of the round is undisclosed, but the company told us that they should be able to get to summer 2011 with it. The round is their second seed round and it's structured as more and more financing rounds nowadays are: It's a seed round that's lead by a VC who has also committed to lead the A round next spring. Why do a VC come in so early in with a group of Angels? Because they want to make sure the Super Angels with minifunds are not eating their lunch, that's why. Even though Microtask news is positive and there exists hardly any threatening Super Angels in the Nordics, there is a lot of debate and tension about the general phenomena elsewhere. These tensions seem to be especially true in the US, where there's more investors battling for the best deals.
Nikolaj Nyholm Joins Sunstone Capital
Nikolaj Nyholm, a Danish serial entrepreneur, who stepped down as Polar Rose's CEO just recently will join a Nordic venture capital firm Sunstone Capital as Partner in the Technology Ventures team on January 1.
Nyholm has spent the last 10 years working with internet infrastructure projects, commercial ventures and organizing, among other things, Reboot with Thomas Madsen-Mygdal. He has previously founded Speednames/Ascio acquired by Group NBT (NBT.NL), Imity merged with Zyb (acquired by Vodaphone Group), and Organic Network, a WiFi startup whose legacy is OpenWRT.org, an open source WiFi project.
Without a doubt this is good move by Sunstone Capital as Nyholm has an extremely wide network and is considered one of the most visionary entrepreneurs in the space. Quite naturally, at Sunstone Nyholm will focus on developing early-stage investments in the software, mobile and an internet space. Commenting his move, Nyholm said that " There aren't enough seasoned entrepreneurs joining VC firms in Europe, which should otherwise allow us to stir things up a whole lot more! " We couldn't agree more.
Neo Technology Secures Seed Funding To Lead NoSQL Movement
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.
