Last year the venture capital is Spanish made several investments in information technologies dedicated to software development. It highlights the international profile of these initiatives and the spin-off origin of some of them.
Internationally oriented software
Ducksboard is one of the best examples of how an international project from its inception. It aims to commoditise the analytics market, providing all companies with access to their metrics in a simple and elegant interface, with a minimal set up that does not require complex integrations or technical staff involvement. During 2012, one year after its launch, it received a €560K round of funding, mainly subscribed by Cabiedes and Partners and Kibo Venturesand the extension was also attended by several Business Angels from the sector such as François Derbaix (Toprural), Jesús Pindado (Strands) and Juan Luis Hortelano (Ambitiona). The funding raised will help the company to consolidate the team and make a significant investment in communication and user acquisition to accelerate the company's growth.
The signing of private equity Spanish Axon Capital made its first investment in India, with an injection of €2.5m in the technology company Captronics Systems. Captronics provides customised automated test equipment (ATEs), automation and data acquisition services for the aerospace and defence, nuclear, automotive and industrial sectors. The company has executed projects in 11 countries for customers such as Bosh , Tata Motors, ABB and Siemens.
SCYTl (a company controlled by Nauta capital, Balderton and Spinnaker) and a world leader in electronic voting technologies, announced the acquisition of the 100% from SOE Software, the industry leader in the United States. The integration of these two software companies creates the industry leader in election software with a full range of solutions from online voting to election night systems and poll worker training and a worldwide presence.
"In the technology sector, internationalisation is an essential requirement to guarantee medium-term survival. If the technology is good, it must work anywhere in the world and it must expand as soon as possible to fill the market gap" advises Diego Gutierrez of Abra Invest.
Examples of spin-offs
BiiCode (actúaupm '11), a cloud software development firm, formed as a spin-off from Polytechnic University of Madrid carried out a capital increase by Big Sur Ventures (investment group founded by José Miguel Herreno) and the Entrecanales Foundation (Fides Group) which will take 11.5% each from this firm.
Catchooma company specialising in augmented reality technology that has developed Visual Search, an image recognition system received a investment of 600k and comes from Inveready First Capitalwhich takes a minority stake in the company. Catchoom is the first spin-off of technologies developed by Telefónica R&D at its Barcelona operations centre. The image recognition technology allows mobile terminals equipped with cameras to use images as an alternative to the keyboard to search for information on the web. Catchoom's main customers are companies that develop augmented reality platforms and applications, such as Layar and Metaiowhich have been using Catchoom's technology on their platforms for the past year.