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Galway-based telecoms software company Am-Beo has secured its second multi-million euro investment in a month by raising EUR10 million on Thursday.
Am-Beo, which provides rating and chain management software for the telecoms industry, received EUR7.5 million in funding from new investor Advent Venture Partners, as well as EUR2.5 million from previous investor ACT Venture Capital. According to Am-Beo, the funding round was over-subscribed.
In early April, the company received EUR3 million with the majority of the money coming from Enterprise Ireland. ACT also invested in the company at that time.
The funding announced on Thursday had been expected as one of the company's co-founder, Anthony Behan, told ElectricNews.Net in April that the EUR3 million was just an "interim" funding round. Just over a year earlier, Am-Beo had raised EUR3.8 million when ACT took a 20 percent stake in the business. Am-Beo declined to divulge what holding ACT has now.
According to the company's chief executive officer, John Brady, the funding will be primarily used to increase its sales force in order to grow revenues. He told ElectricNews.Net that Am-Beo plans to open a sales office in the US, two in Europe and one in Asia over the coming months. It will also look to employ a number of product development and implementation engineers. In total, Am-Beo expects to nearly double its workforce from around 50 to close to 100 within a year.
Am-Beo's core product, Rate-Rec, collects data on transactions made on a network and places prices on them. Brady said that one of its uses is in deciding who gets what revenue when multiple parties are involved in a transaction. "For example, with GPRS, which is always-on, users will soon be billed for what services they use. So if they decided to stream a video onto their phones, our software can decide how much of the fee for that service goes to the video provider and how much goes to the network operator," explained Brady.
Am-Beo has recently signed a number of strategic alliances with companies such as Intel, Oracle, HP and Iona Technologies, and in April it penned a global alliance agreement with systems integrator Fujitsu, which will see the multi-national re-sell Rate-Rec after the product received a "best of breed" rating from the IT company. Brady said the deal with Fujitsu could be "potentially huge" for the company and is likely to be worth several millions of euro in revenue to Am-Beo.
Founded in 2000, Am-Beo expects to be profitable by the first quarter of 2004. Brady said the current round of funding would ensure that it would make profitability by that date, but would also mean the company's survival for at least two years in a "worst-case" scenario. "We decided to take a careful approach as I don't think that the IT market is going to recover as quickly as other people seem to," he remarked.
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