”The majority of the money comes from the US. Some of the investors are new, but there are also some of our previous investors who have been in this round” says Rickard Hansson, founder and CEO.

Expansion towards the US

The investment will lay the foundation for a continued expansion on the US market. The head office, formerly located in Malmö, has already been moved to Los Angeles. Currently, fifteen people are working in the American office, while eight people are working in Malmö. Within a year, Incentive’s ambition is to expand the development team to 20- 30 persons and the sales and marketing team to 10 – 20 persons. Marketing and sales department will be located in the United States.

”We want a geek-office with developers in Malmö. There are many extremely talented developers in Sweden and in the Malmö region” says Rickard Hansson.

Since the start, Incentive has received venture capital of approximately € 3 millions. The latest investment will be the starting point to profitability for Incentive; Rickard Hansson estimates that the company will have positive results in early 2016.

Perviously there has been talk about aiming for an IPO soon. If those plans are still relevant with this investment round is unknown.

The post Incentive receives € 1.5 M investments and aims for the US appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

This is Incentives third round, and will be aimed at further expansion in the U.S.

Private cloud solution

Incentives solution is a social collaboration platform for enterprises, payed for by a subscription fee. A big difference to other solutions is Incentives focus on private clouds and their software being installed on their costumers computers. Something that has gotten a lot of interest the recent years, as awareness of exploits and data leaks have increased, as well as a greater caution towards giving Amazon, Google and other big corporates access to information.

“Our vision is to make people life happier, avoiding frustration and irritation with cumbersome internal systems and email” Says CEO Rickard Hansson to 8till5.

With the funding the sales team in the U.S. will be strengthened, as well as the development team in Malmö. The aim with the current investment is to become cashflow positive.

“The goals is that the € 2 M investment will go all the way to being profitable. We strive to reaching break-even in october 2016.” Rickard says.

Earlier this year there where talks about Incentive aiming for an IPO next, but with this new round of financing this has changed. If there still are plans to go public soon is unknown for now.

The post Incentive announces € 2M investment round appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

“In November we got Semmy Rülf as the Chairman of Incentive and just recently we have also been joined by Martin Walfisz, which we are very proud of. The plan is that we will open for a listing of the company this summer already.” says Rickard Hansson, CEO at Incentive.

The IPO that is hinted at will probably be on the NASDAQ OMX First North exchange, but exact details are unknown.

Incentive is currently aiming primarily at the U.S. market for social intranets and will make major investments in the United States. In a recent session at the StartupDojo event Richard shared a lot of his experiences from building the U.S. part of the business.

Intranet solution software

Incentive develops software that allows companies and organizations to create their own social intranet, a type of collaboration platform that allows organizations to work smarter and spend less time searching for information. The idea is that all knowledge, both formal and informal, will end up in the same searchable structure.

One of the key points in regards to competing software is that the incentive can be installed on its own servers behind the firewall, which is appreciated by a large percentage of U.S. companies – especially after last year’s PRISM and wikileaks scandal.

In early March they released Incentive 3, a brand new version that focuses more on working smarter and protection of business critical data.

The post Incentive announces new round of funding – and hints at IPO plans this summer! appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Apart from that a somewhat unusual presentation was held as well: Rickard Hansson was invited over Skype to talk about their current US expansion. Rickard is CEO at the startup Incentive, who in earlier got an investment and has since then opened an office in Los Angeles.

He talked about and got a lot of questions about how the expansion plans are going. Here are some of the insights he shared.

When talking about difficulties in setting up the businesses:

“It’s pretty easy to set up the corporate here in the US. The hard part are the banks – they are a lot harder on security and fraud protection.”

The decision to move over to the US was based on statistics. 70% of their revenue was from the US, most of that from west-coast, so having a presence there was important. That Los Angeles was chosen had to do with a chance meeting, where he got good connections to the Los Angeles scene. It has other benefits as well, he added:

“You pay a third or a quarter of what things cost in silicon valley, which is a great advantage.”

One of the questions form the audience was on how they planned to grow the office quickly.

“We will be using recruiting firms, like everyone else here. We are part of good network here and that is a great thing. We are looking for marketing, business development and sales in the US. But we will keep the engineering in scandinavia – we want to have the development back home”

Another question was about the biggest mistake so far

“One thing that caught me by surprise was thinking that things will go faster because it is in the US. That was not true. The first meeting always feels good, but then things take forever to get started. It’s the opposite to Scandinavia – there it takes a long time to get to know each-other, but once you are past that stage you are up and running quickly.”

Regarding their sales process he shared some interesting insights, about inside sales and how that works

“Here in LA sales are done over Skype from ’inside sales’ offices instead of meetings. It takes so much time to just to get a couple of miles in car because of all the traffic, so everyone does the initial sales process over Skype instead of setting up a meeting.”

One question was about difference between overhead costs and total costs of employees in US vs Sweden.

“It’s not that big a difference. Right now everything is pretty cheap because of currency exchange rates. Employee costs in total are however comparable to Scandinavian levels, I would say it is on par. Depends a little one what field – sales is a bit cheaper, but engineers are just as expensive as in Sweden.”

A last question was if he had any good advice for those starting a startup. There he shared an interesting personal opinion:

“If you do a startup, try to have partners, but try not to have them working in the company. I would recommend co-founders that are not active in daily operations. Otherwise when things go good everything is fine, but when things go bad it gets tough.”

We wish Rickard good luck with the US expansion, and thank him for sharing some of the knowledge gained.

The post Rickard Hansson from Incentive at Startup Dojo about US expansion appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Semmy is a respected business man with a past at both Qliktech, Axis Communications and Dignitana. And he sees a lot of similarities between especially Qliktech and Incentive:

“Incentive, similar to Qliktech, is about software, getting investors to understand the product and to achieve sales in the US.” Semmy said to Sydsvenskan.

Incentive, who works in the enterprise intranet / collaboration segment, already has most of it’s client in the US. In contrast to Podio, Echo.it and other startups from this region that work in this field, Incentive is not cloud-based – but rather a server side installations for costumers. Something that sets them apart.

The next step for the startup is to raise more funding, where Semmy will play a key role:

“I’m joining Incentive at a phase where we will raise more capital, and maybe being listed at one of the smaller lists in Sweden. These are things I have done before in several different companies, so I feel I can contribute with my network and my skill set” he says.

Great news that we will keep an eye on, and this is another indication of the strength in B2B communication software that the Øresund region has.

The post Semmy Rülf new chairman at Incentive – talks about further investments appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

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).

The post Formpipe acquires Lemoon – win for game developers appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

“We are very proud to be nominated in such a prestigious contest as the WSA. We already knew that Incentive – a social business tool for increasing efficiency within an organization, and still keeping critical business data safe behind the firewall – is a great product ….. it is great to get acknowledged by experts who meticulously search the world for smart digital innovations”, says Incentive founder and CEO Rickard Hansson in the Incentive Newsroom.

They are in the running for the winner’s prize, including invitation to the WSA World Congress in Colombo, Sri Lanka in October; pitching sessions, project exhibition booth, accommodation and meals travel grants; connections to industry leaders, sponsors and partners, and coverage through all WSA media channels. Nominees will be judged on quality and comprehensiveness, ease of use, value added through interactivity, design, craftsmanship (technical realisation), strategic importance and accessibility, and evaluation for the awards will begin in August 2013. Best of luck!

The post Smart Content for Smart People: Incentive nominated for WSA 2013! appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Last month CEO Rickard Hansson was in the US to talk to Microsoft Channel 9 and presented Incentive on TV podcast. Hansson will be back, offering his expertise around social business and cloud solutions, as he embarks on a Californian Roadshow, in Los Angeles 10 to 14 May, then San Francisco 15 to 17 May. Anyone wanting to book a meeting can get in contact with Rickard.

The post Incentive office in LA! appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Watch the episode of Web Camps TV, where host Brady Gaster and Hansson walk through Incentive. Hansson presents the latest version Incentive 2.7 features in Windows Azure, including a demo of how to customise appearance and build wikis, articles and blogs, using Microsoft WebMatrix 3. Hansson shows how Incentive can be integrated into Yammer, for organisations that have deployed Yammer already, and enhance it with Incentive’s Dashboard, wiki and activity stream features.

The Incentive product, social business software for enterprises, is one of the highest-rated applications featured in the Microsoft Web App Gallery. Hansson notes Incentive version 3 will be released later this year, with extra options and features based on client needs.

The post Rickard Hansson presents Incentive for Microsoft TV appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Says founder and CEO Rickard Hansson:

“Primarily, what we want to do, is to convert the close to a thousand downloads per month to paying customers. To do this we first and foremost need to build a small organization that only does this, and depending on how it goes and the pace we want to keep, we could be looking at taking in additional funding next year.”

During this year, Hampus Jakobsson, (founder of TAT), Martin Walfisz (founder of Massive) and Andreas Sjöström (Sogeti) have all joined a newly formed advisory board to further help Incentive to grow.

Incentive is a downloadable server software that includes activity streams, wikis, blogs, and apps – that you set up securely behind your own firewall.

The post Incentive secures SEK 3 million to take on the American market appeared first on Øresund Startup News.