myQube to raise SFr20 million for startups
The seed stage investor and incubator firm, myQube, is seeking growth capital for two of its Swiss startup firms, A4 Vision and SoftPlumbers.
Two of its four Geneva-based startups are ready for first round venture financing, myQube told Swiss Venture Update. The news is significant for two reasons. First, the size of the rounds, at SFr10 million each will put them in the same league as the Java specialist software firm, Esmertec, and the process management software firm, Brightrivers, two
More mature Swiss companies that raised a total of SFr10 million each in the past 12 months.
The second reason that it is significant is that myQube is probably the last remaining incubator still active in Switzerland and its efforts are starting to bear impressive fruit. A host of incubators emerged here, as they did across Europe, in the late nineties to help (mostly) Internet startups grow and develop products as fast as possible.
Most of them have pulled the plug or are inactive now, including the
McKinsey Accelerator in Dubendorf outside Zurich, NCI Cube (from HP) and
Nascendo in Geneva, to name a few.
MyQube is growing, with offices in Brussels, Geneva, Helsinki, Milan,
Munich and Palo Alto. It just received a vote of confidence in its
successful management of early stage ventures from the European Investment
Fund (EIF), which has committed to invest 17.5 million Euros EuroQube, the
pan-European venture capital fund managed by myQube.
The EIF was established in 1994 as a joint venture between the European
Investment Bank (which has become its majority shareholder), the European
Commission and a number of European banks and financial institutions
First to market
myQube says it is seeking smart capital from venture capital investors located in the markets where the startups plan to sell their products. That
means that for SoftPlumbers, founded by two CERN alumni in 2001, the
incubator managers will seek “Swiss, European, and US investors” to put up
the 10 million francs needed to go to the next stage, according to Michele
Raucci, a myQube co-founder who spoke to Swiss Venture Update at a recent
industry event.
Founded in 2001 in Geneva, SoftPlumbers is developing a new kind of desktop
management software entirely based on the emerging WEMS-CIM standard.
The suite of products can be managed by non-expert administrators, which
will cut the cost of ownership of desktops and servers, say its creators. A
feature that makes it well suited to small and medium sized enterprise users.
WEMS-CIM is a standard for a data model and describing managed elements
across the enterprise, including systems, networks, and applications. There
are competing models, but WEMS-CIM is supported in products from Tivoli,
Cisco, BMC, HP, Manage.com, Microsoft and others, according to Network
World, a computing trade publication.
The other firm that myQube will seek funding for is A4 Vision, a firm
developing proprietary hardware and software to digitalise 3D images for
Internet applications through a fully automated and low cost process. Its
first application is face recognition software for the security market. “A4
Vision’s business is appealing to Silicon Valley money,” says Raucci.
by Valerie Thompson
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.