Stockholm company Formpipe has purchased Lemoon, a software startup from Skåne. This translates into good news for emerging game developers, because proceeds from the sale will be used to invest in developers trying to enter the market, reports Sydsvenskan.
Malmö-based CEO Rickard Hansson (who has been mentioned here before in his activities as Incentive founder and CEO) and business partner sold Lemoon for around €500,000 (just over 4 million SEK). The funds will be channelled into investments to help game developers start companies and come out on the market. The basis for this venture is Rickard’s company Embark On A Great Venture Investment AB.
“Almost all the tools to build games today are free, until the day you are going to start selling them and have to pay. It has lowered the threshold for building games for a lot of people with gaming dreams, but to 99 percent it remains a pet project they work at all night and remain flipping burgers during the day,” said Hansson.
The idea is to go in as a business angel offering smaller amounts in the starting position from 50,000 to 100,000 crowns (€5800+), to help game developers focus on trying to finish the games, create companies and proceed to market.
” …. 50,000SEK is quite a lot of money and most importantly you get someone who believes in you…. I can add quite a lot about the entrepreneurial side of things when it comes to building companies from scratch. That was what I had wanted when I started,” says Hansson, a seasoned software entrepreneur.
The sale is an opportunity to move on, and also complement Formpipe’s products. Lemoon, which is system for building websites and intranets, is currently used by about 200 companies and organizations. The acquisition, reported in the Wall Street Journal online, will help Formpipe expand sales, and increase license revenue through integrating new products on this technology and extending existing web publishing strategy, mainly used for the public sector.
“We have been doing this since 2002, but now our focus is on other things and we needed someone who was more suited to manage Lemoon. Formpipe will focus on selling it to customers and will take over our customers and service contracts.” confirms Hansson to Sydsvenskan.
Edit: Correction! Angelika Öberg is not a business partner as written here previously, rather, one of the team at Lemoon.
Update: If you want to hear more about Richard then watch Hackernytt episode 2, where he is guest (in swedish).