Ex CSR VP leverages £1.2m in Camrivox
One of the signs of a successful completion of a start-up is the subsequent dividends to the local economy. A sustainable water-flow of nurturing new ideas, seed investments in new start-ups, leveraged finance by ex co-founders and senior executives of successful companies is a true sign of successful clusters formations. Camrivox founding investor Phil O’Donovan, ex co-founder and senior VP of CSR, is a good example of this.
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Leveraging £1.2m
Camrivox Ltd (Cambridge, UK), which was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Cambridge, has raised £1.2 million from a consortium of investors. Camrivox is a unified communications innovator and developer of computer telephony integration (CTI) software for the SME market. The over-subscribed funding round was led by NESTA investments and involved existing shareholders, including founding investor and chairman, Dr Phil O’Donovan, and Create Partners.
New investors included Bank of Scotland Growth Equity who invested alongside business angel members of Oxford Investment Opportunity Network (OION) under its co-investment programme arrangement.
Camrivox will use the funding to develop its main product, ‘Flexor’, which provides computer telephony integration (CTI) software for customer relationship management (CRM) applications that specifically target small and medium enterprise (SME) price points and integration.
Flexor allows the PC and telephone to work in unison, so that applications are integrated with phone calls, thus providing a raft of productivity enhancing features to sales staff who gain automatic access to records whilst speaking to customers. It also tracks customer enquiries and generate call reports. To date, the majority of CTI deployments with CRM have been to large businesses and have required significant investment in infrastructure, hardware and software.
Camrivox has made CTI software easy to use and cost-effective by creating a package that can be downloaded directly from the web to the PC for the first time, enabling SMEs to benefit from the latest telephony CRM integration systems without the need for significant additional investment or training.
It has a range of partners to supply its software to the SME market. Most recently, the company announced it is joining forces with SNOM Technology AG, a major German IP phone supplier, to provide a web-delivered CTI product for Salesforce users of SNOM’s IP phones. Further applications are already in the pipeline and will be available during the first half of 2008.
Malcolm Wood, CEO of Camrivox, said, “We are delighted to have secured this new investment, which will enable us to ramp up our sales and distribution activity, secure more partnerships and build on our core technologies to deliver new products in the unified communications market place. We are pleased that our existing shareholders have continued to back us by re-investing and we welcome on board NESTA, Bank of Scotland Growth Equity and the OION network investors. We feel sure that this mix of high net worth and institutional investors will provide support for our business over the long term.”
Camrivox is now preparing for the official launch of its software offering with SNOM at CeBIT on 4 March in Hanover, Germany. This launch will give SNOM’s new and existing users the opportunity to upgrade to the Flexor CTI software on their phones.
Jonathan Kestenbaum, CEO of NESTA, said, “Camrivox offer a clear proposition in the large and growing market for unified communications and we were particularly attracted by the excellent progress the Company has made building relationships with major CRM players and channel partners. It is critical that high potential UK businesses like this have access to the kinds of support and finance they need to succeed.”
Matt Pieterse, an investor director and partner at CREATE Partners, said, “We first invested in Camrivox two years ago during their seed funding round and are pleased to see how much progress the company has made. Camrivox’s new Flexor CTI software dramatically changes the economic equation for its customers, by delivering a new approach to traditional telephony – increasing choice and helping customers to reduce their costs without ripping out and replacing existing investments. This additional investment, applied with the continued ingenuity and ambition of Camrivox’s management team, will see the company expand quickly in collaboration with leading industry partners.”
The investment in Camrivox marks the first deal under the co-investment programme recently launched by Bank of Scotland Growth Equity and the OION Network, which enables the bank to match investments made by OION network members.
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© Chilli Publishing Ltd 2008 |
17 FEB 2008 |
