TheStartup.eu

WHEB Ventures, one of Europe’s leading clean technology private equity and venture capital firms, has achieved the final closing of its second clean technology fund, WHEB Ventures Private Equity Fund 2 LP, at £105.4m (€125m-$145m).

James McNaught-Davis, WHEB’s Managing Partner, said: “We are very pleased to announce the final closing of our second cleantech private equity fund. Raising over £105 million during the deepest recession since the 1930s is an achievement. WHEB Ventures is one of very few cleantech venture capital firms to have raised significant amounts of capital since September 2008.”

WHEB Fund 2’s investors are a mix of institutions and family offices. The institutional investors include the European Investment Fund, the Environmental Innovation Fund managed by Hermes and a leading US fund of pension funds. The family offices comprise a range of leading industrial and financial families including the Bamfords (who own JCB plc), the Goldsmiths, Lord Jacob Rothschild (Chairman of RIT plc) and Simon Robertson (Chairman of Rolls Royce plc).

“The WHEB team now looks forward to focusing its efforts on investing this new cleantech fund while continuing to support our existing portfolio of investee companies, some of which should be ripe for exit during the next 12 months.” said McNaught-Davis.

WHEB’s Fund 2 has made six investments since its first closing in July 2008. These investments address markets in the energy efficiency, green industrial processes and waste management sectors.

Huddle, the real time collaboration startup based in the Uk, just announced a major investment and the opening of a US office.

The funding was led by Matrix Partners, an investor in Apple, HubSpot and Gilt. Existing investors Eden Ventures and Huddle’s chairman Charles McGregor also participated in the round.

The London-based company is already profitable and will quadruple in size in the next few years, said Alastair Mitchell,

Huddle’s CEO. Mitchell will move to the US and the company will use the latest funding to continue building its US customer base, which includes Disney and Procter & Gamble.

Huge congratulations to the very friendly team at Huddle for keeping the eu scene interesting to foreign investors, I am sure they will have a very successful adventure.

Read more on their blog and Techcrunch.

• 
  Austrian venture capital house GCP gamma capital partners has sold online trading platform FatFoogoo to NASDAQ-listed e-commerce group Digital River. The exit values FatFoogoo at $10m and GCP has further agreed an earnout provision.
• 
  GrandCentrix GmbH, a Cologne, Germany-based start up which develops a “Smartphone Analytics” technology, has received an undisclosed investment from High-Tech Gründerfonds.The company develops and provides a Platform as a Service (PaaS) which allows suppliers of interactive mobile value added services to achieve a comprehensive consolidation of mobile user identities.
• 
  EnjoyVenture has led a second round of financing for amedo Smart Tracking Solutions GmbH.
• 
  I-Source has led a €3m first round of financing in Compario, an e-commerce company, along side XAnge Private Equity.
• 
  MMC Ventures has invested an undisclosed amount in mobile telecommunications software designer Creativity Software in return for a significant minority stake.
• 
  Belgian provider of payment solutions Clear2Pay has acquired Jware Technologies, an internationally operating software technology provider of eCommerce and mobile payment solutions.
• 
  Qualitas Private Equity has increased its stake in social networking site Tuenti Technologies to 30%.

YFM Private Equity has invested £300,000 in UK software vendor, FreshTL.

The financing is part of a £600,000 co-investment deal with Greener House Investments, and marks YFM’s first investment from the North West Interim Venture Capital Fund.
FreshTL has created a crowd computing platform that is a combination of software from IBM and Bricsys – a Belgian software vendor.

Yoom.de, an innovative online platform for tenant-to-tenant residential real estate transactions, has raised further growth capital from Earlybird Venture Capital. Currently, Earlybird manages over 430 million Euros of assets for an international investor base investing in innovative, fast growing companies with outstanding management teams and high growth potential in international markets. Earlybird’s portfolio currently includes more than 25 companies in seven countries, they invested in over 70 companies and scored several successful trade sales and IPOs.

The company received seed financing from angel investors in spring 2009 while the new round is rumored to be in the single-digit million Euro amount,  following its successful market entry.

Hopefully they will use the money to put up an english version and enter other european markets.

Malte Niebuhr, Managing Director at Yoom.de, is delighted: ”Earlybird Venture Capital is a high-class investor who has already very actively supported us during our start-up phase and continues to do so in the growth phase we are now entering and very much looking forward to.

Yoom.de enables current and new tenants, landlords and asset / facility managers to efficiently execute the tenant changing process without involving real estate agents, whilst at the same time providing an economic benefit for all parties by revolutionising the value chain.

Dr. Christian Nagel, Managing Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital, comments: “Yoom.de is an innovative business model with the potential to eliminate a market inefficiency – namely high real estate agent commissions without agents providing a noticeable service or value-ad in return. The first transactions on the platform have proven that the model offers significant advantages not only to previous and subsequent tenants, but also to landlords and asset / facility managers compared to the estate agent-model. We are very convinced of the business idea.”

High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), DuMont Venture and bAV Consult have sold their stakes in northworks Software to games provider Travian Games in early March.

Now, the same High-Tech Gründerfonds, now together with RapidTainment, have also made a seven figure seed round in online game company UP Web Game GmbH.
“People enjoy playing with each other,” the founders Ibrahim Evsan and Thomas Bachem comment “and the Internet makes it possible to realize completely new concepts.” Evsan and Bachem have developed the idea behind the game since 2005, until they put it aside for some time in order to found the video platform sevenload. “However, we are entrepreneurs, and sometimes you can’t let an idea go. This game is one of those very special projects, and we are happy to finally implement it together with strong partners”.

Tobias Hartmann, who joined end of 2009 as co-founder: “Our two investors complement each other perfectly. RapidTainment AG is a very powerful partner with an exciting strategic vision, while HTGF contributes an excellent VC network and a high degree of professionalism”.