VC Perspectives

Eniram, a Finnish IT-company that helps vessels to decrease fuel consumption, has just closed a financing round of €5M with Ferd Venture, Finnish Industry Investment and existing investor Conor Venture Partners.

Congratulations to the team and Conor (who was the first investor in March 2008) for the excellent news showing that there is still adequate venture financing for promising companies developing in the right direction (Eniram has signed and delivered a number of systems since launching the product 6 months ago).

Read the full press release here: http://www.eniram.fi/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=54&Itemid=64

Andrew Chen has posted a condensed and yet brilliantly efficient way of finding out whether your online business makes sense or not. Seemingly out of the blue, he introduces the concept of “customer lifetime value”. Although this is an established concept in the offline world, it has for some reason not resonated well with all online entrepreneurs. Chen concludes the obvious: in order for your freemium business to make sense:

[Lifetime value]
has to be larger than
[Cost per acquisition + Cost of service (paying & free)]

An excel sheet is included to the benefit of entrepreneurs and - hopefully - also us. Before pitching your freemium business: run the numbers!

Ted Valentin, my favourite swedish pro-bono entrepreneur, has rallied a fantastic crowd for his three-day 24 hour business camp at Yasuragi Hasseludden, starting tomorrow. I tried to state my case to him in late November why it would make sense to include Creandum among the main sponsors. I was surprised to learn that all four sponsor slots were filled and that there was simply no room left. Not negotiable.

I will not hide that I was surprised, but let it be clear that I admire his position greatly - Ted is committed to giving the 90 entrepreneurs and the four gold sponsors that he had already signed up (and promised that they would be no more than four) the best possible product.

I hope that the event will be a great success and that some interesting new ventures will spring from it. Bon Courage!

We’re already well into 2009 and we can look back at a turbulent 2008 with a financial crisis, economic recession but also exciting company developments and new investments.

During 2008, we looked at around 400 companies eventually investing in 4 companies and now have 7 portfolio companies in our latest fund. The companies we invested in covered a wide range of technologies:

• IPtronics (Denmark). A semi-conductor company founded by some of the people behind Giga that was sold to Intel for USD 1.25 billion in 2000.
• Spotify (Sweden): An innovative and legal digital music service offering instant access to pretty much all music on the planet. The team is headed by serial entrepreneurs Martin Lorentzon (co-founder of TradeDoubler) and Daniel Ek (Skype, Stardoll).
• Videoplaza (Sweden): Provides premium publishers with an ad server for video, specifically catering for the needs of well known online brands with high-quality web tv content and a proprietary sales force.
• Xtract (Finland): A software company helping mobile operators and online advertisers create accurate and automated consumer profiles based on social interactions, behavioural and demographic data.

In addition to our new investments, we also made a pretty thorough exit-analysis where we have analyzed about 200 Nordic technology exits during the last 10 years. We’ll cover this study in more detail in a later post.