Read more about our transactions by clicking on the links to the left.

1CT's second fund, 1CT Equity II realizes its first exit

HentTilbud (http://www.henttilbud.dk), an internet service for house owners seeking craftsmen and vice versa, is sold to the Danish Media Group, North Media (http://www.northmedia.dk).

The exit comes after a 10-fold increase in valuation of the business over 12 months and 15 months after 1CTs initial investment. In the same period, the number of employees has gone from 5 to 25 and revenues have grown by similar proportions.

North Media has purchased the entire company in a pursuit to grow its on-line activities. At the same time, 1CT will remain involved in the continued growth of HentTilbud as a key resource and participant in an attractive earn-out.

1CT has invested in Artificial Intelligence company a2i.

1CT has completed its 6th portfolio company investment. The investment is made from 1CTs second fund, 1CT Equity II.

The company is Danish a2i Systems ApS, a software company that develops industry disruptive solutions based on Artificial Intelligence.

Its first major success is a solution for fuel retailers. The solution significantly increases profitability without loss of volume.

Fuel is a commodity and the market in most countries is quite volatile with customers that are both very price sensitive and disloyal. Other pricing solutions in the market are rule based solutions, that can help analyze the vast amounts of data and serve as decision support to experienced fuel pricing managers. No other retail fuel pricing solution can predict customer behavior and optimize pricing without loss of volume.

For more information see: http://www.a2i.dk or contact 1CT Partner, Jonas Pilgaard at +45 2140 1070.

“1CTs insightful advice and dedication made a big difference”

Leif Vestergaard, CEO of EG on EG's acquisition of the Swedish utility company Computer Services AB in January 2011

Sitexploration is a tool for SEO experts that provide the intelligence to get high page ranking in search engines.

Many organisations live and die by how they rank in search yet the practitioners of the dark art of Search Engine Optimization have, until now, had very few tools to help them understand why they - and their competitors - rank as they do. Sitexploration is a very powerful tool for SEO experts and corporate marketing departments that build and maintain their own sites.

Sitexploration analyse links to and from nominated web sites and builds a link profile for each site. The analysis is based on data continually collected using Sitexploration's proprietary semantic search engine. By using semantic search, the context of links and keywords are better understood and provides a better and more accurate link profile.

1CT is very proud to announce its investment in Sitexploration and look forward to help this exciting company provide its service to an even wider audience.

RFQ internet service provider HentTilbud is 1CT's newest investment

1CT Management is proud to announce our investment in the company /internetservice, HentTilbud, which translated to English means “Get an offer”. The company is in the fast growing business of RfQ ( Request for Quotation) and focuses on private peoples need for help on house renovations, gardening, cleaning etc.. HentTilbud has 5 years of experience in the market and is already a top 3 player in the industry. The Danish RfQ industry has great potential and it is the goal of HentTilbud to help the Danes understand the obvious benefits of RfQ and to establish themselves as the main and most trustworthy player.

Chairman of FDIM (Association of Danish Interactive Media) and owner of Peytz & Co., Christian Peytz is joining the company as Chairman of the Board. Christian has strong experience in the media market and can help the company in many ways but mainly in the dialogue with the big media players, who are beginning to see the need for new ways of attracting payers to the declining market of advertisement.

The newly appointed CEO, Michael Pedersen said: “ I come from the traditional Yellow Page industry, and see major market opportunities in this new RfQ-platform for "connecting buyers and sellers". From the users perspective the buying process is more convenient compared to the traditional way of searching for handymen, and from the suppliers perspective it fits to the business model they like - performance based cost.”

1CT has high expectations for HentTilbud’s growth potential. Largely because of its ability to establish partnerships with primary media and membership organizations at a shared revenue based business model. Today HentTilbud has cooperation with IdéNyt and Pricerunner and many others are on the way. The pipeline includes some of the largest players in the media industry as well as buyer organizations and real estate.

Strengthening its Nordic leadership within Retail related services, 1CT acted as exclusive advisor to EG in their acquisition of ASP

Caramba imaging has developed unique software for automatic image enhancement that greatly reduces the image manipulation costs at publishers, newspapers and other companies working professionally with images.

Olaf Grønvaldt (former CEO and co-founder of Speakanet) has joined the company as new CEO and Jonas Pilgaard, partner in 1CT, will join the board as Chairman. Caramba Imaging is relocating to 1CT’s offices in Copenhagen to fully leverage the synergy with 1CT and its vast network.

The market for automatic image enhancement is expected to grow dramatically. Currently app. 90% of all images are manipulated by hand - graphic designers using Photoshop and other image manipulation programs. Caramba enhances the images according to customized standards using unique patent pending algorithms. Caramba automatically corrects and improve images on a wide range of parameters, including selective color, selective sharpening and gamma. This saves at least 80% of the cost compared to manual editing. Key target markets are large publishers as well as in-house marketing departments in large organizations.

The benefit for customers is automated, consistent image correction and significant cost reduction. The Danish publisher Aller Press A/S documented ROI of less than 1 month on their investment in Caramba software. Other Caramba customers are experiencing similarly impressive return on investment.

Competitive solutions do exist, but none of them can match Caramba’s level of efficiency and accuracy. Comparative evaluations show that customers consistently reach 85% success rate with Caramba processed images compared to 40% for other solutions.

Caramba’s founder, Henrik Paltoft has a strong background in the industry, and brings 15 years expertise to Caramba. Together with his partner, Kaspar Larsen, he is confident that their partnership with 1CT will ensure Caramba’s future success.

“After the first meeting in Copenhagen I was hoping we could make a deal. We were in great need of immediate sales assistance and our business model needed some adjustments from experienced people. We feel sure that 1CT can help us succeed internationally as well as secure us a great exit”, commented Paltoft.

To learn more about Caramba Imaging please visit this website: http://www.carambaimaging.com

For more information, please contact: Jonas Pilgaard, Partner at 1CT, jp (at) 1corptech (dot) com or +45 21401070

Click here for a PDF version of this news release

Strengthening its Nordic leadership within Utility related services, 1CT acted as exclusive advisor to EG in their acquisition of Energyfront.

Mindstorm, a major player in interactive, multi-touch surface computing hits the road running with 1CT investment.

We are pleased to finally announce our investment in Mindstorm Ltd, a UK based company leading the world of multi-touch surface computing. We've been working with Mindstorm since the beginning of the year where the 1CT investment allowed the already very successful company to refine their strategy, develop new products and launch campaigns to major corporations across the globe.

This week, Mindstorm is launching these products and with a major PR coup in the UK, the UK version of The X Factor used a Mindstorm Aurora Table to select the 24 acts that will compete in this years competition. More than 12 million viewers saw X Factor judges Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Dannii Minogue and Louis Walsh deliberate, drag images of the contestands around and drop them in the "Yes", "No" or "Maybe" boxes. More on that story can be found here

Mindstorm is, however, much more than X Factor. Their multi-touch technology is installed across the globe with prestigious companies such as Google, Audi, Nokia, BMW, Chanel, Mexicana as well as prestigious clubs across the world.

With 20 people, multi-million pound turnover and impressive year-on-year growth, Mindstorm is poised to dominate interactive, multi-touch surface computing. Where others have solutions with very restrictive form-factors, Mindstorm's solutions can be built into furniture such as a bar or a table or be projected onto walls, floors, tables, etc.

Kenneth Siber, one of the two Danish Mindstorm founders (the other is Thomas Jensen), has published a paper on how we're at the dawn of a new paradigm in human-computer interaction.

Read Kenneth's view here