Investor Support and Reflections on Penneo’s Journey

In a LinkedIn post following the announcement, Nicolaj Højer Nielsen shared his enthusiastic backing for Visma’s offer. Reflecting on Penneo’s journey from its early days in a basement to becoming a company with over DKK 100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), Nicolaj likened the entrepreneurial experience to extreme sports:

“It costs blood, sweat, and tears, with many ups and downs. But with perseverance and patience, you can go far!”

While he acknowledged his passive role as an investor in recent years, Nicolaj emphasized his pride in Penneo’s accomplishments and credited the employees for their hard work.

“All the credit goes to the incredible team who made Penneo what it is today.”

Strategic Alignment

Penneo, now listed on Nasdaq Copenhagen, has built a reputation for streamlining business processes for anti-money laundering-regulated B2B companies. The acquisition aligns with Visma’s strategy of expanding its mission-critical software portfolio through both organic growth and acquisitions.

“Penneo has impressed us with its strong capabilities within B2B SaaS products, which are highly complementary to Visma’s existing offerings in the European market. By joining Visma, Penneo would continue to operate as a distinct entity while benefiting from our capabilities, enabling faster and stronger growth.”

said Merete Hverven, CEO of Visma.

The Board of Directors of Penneo has unanimously indicated its intent to recommend that shareholders accept the offer, which is subject to approval by the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority. Jostein Vik, Chairman of the Board at Penneo, emphasized the advantages of the deal:

“Partnering with Visma will further strengthen Penneo’s position within digital signature and KYC. This offer is an appreciation of our employees and their accomplishments, and it reflects Visma’s confidence in our continued development.”

Jostein Vik said

The offer has already gained significant shareholder backing. Major stakeholders, including Danica Pension, BankInvest, and Viking Venture 29 AS, as well as Penneo’s founders and management team, have provided irrevocable undertakings representing 43% of voting rights. Additionally, ATP, holding 9.9% of voting rights, has expressed its intention to accept the offer.

This move marks another strategic expansion for Visma, which continues to focus on simplifying and automating complex processes for businesses across Europe and beyond.

The post Visma Launches Acquisition Offer for Penneo at a over 100% Premium appeared first on Øresund Startups.

David Helgason, founder of Unity, told an interested audience how the company was one of the first to fully benefit from the smartphone revolution, where you suddenly could access 2 billion consumers though an inexpensive and efficient channel.

Delivering a game engine used by a third of all mobile games publishers has made their software get onto more than 2 billion handsets.

A key factor in their success was the timing, but also that they moved to Silicon Valley and lived the “Silicon Valley Playbook” by going freemium at a time when that was not at all common.

Unity’s pricing model where they made it easier and cheaper to buy their software compared to the competition was also key to success.

Your business model determines your destiny!

Your business model is what makes you scalable, it’s the denominator of whether you are successful or not: If your business model is not good enough and you try to scale, you will fail. Lose money, implode.
If you have the right business model you can scale. Then it makes sense to fuel your growth with venture capital.
Listening to six founders who got it right was inspiring, when each of them took the stage at the Nordic Growth Hackers #7 on January 25th at Founders House in Copenhagen.

Siteimprove cracked onboarding

Waiting 12 years before taking in any external funding secured full control of the company, explained Siteimprove founder, Morten Ebbesen. And he stresses that full control is essential to early growth.
But some things cannot be controlled – and sometimes love overrules your business plan:
A Danish VP of Siteimprove fell in love with a Minneapolis resident. Now they have two kids and he’s managing 150 people – in Minneapolis. This proved to be less expensive than the two typically preferred cities for startups going to the US – San Francisco and New York .

SiteImprove has added more than 100 salespeople over the past year. The only way to do that is by onboarding in an extremely structured way. Hiring an external recruiter to take care of the full process of hiring and onboarding has proven very successful, reducing churn and improving sales performance.

Know your customers

Penneo’s greatest growth hack was to change from a free-signup-and-pay-per-use model to a prepaid subscription. That took the two year-old company from 0 to 10 million DKK in revenue.

If you’re planning to sell different kinds of soap products in the future, keep in mind that custom soap boxes are very creative and a great tool for marketing.

Along the same lines, Iconfinder found out that they had a wrong idea about how their customers paid for their service. Designers & developers rarely have a company credit card, so the model of paying separately per icon download really held their users back. Switching to a monthly subscription with (almost) unlimited downloads made their revenue skyrocket.

No more awkward board meetings looking at 0-growth. Or at least not that awkward, Martin LeBlanc Eigtved of Iconfinder added. The board didn’t allow him to rest on his laurels but asked for even more growth: True growth hacking mindset!

Tradeshift is about democratizing business. Kind of a bold vision, but constantly repeating this big, hairy, audacious goal was what propelled the six year-old company into many Fortune 500 companies and made it sensible for them to host their own events at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.
Control your key revenue drivers

Tactile Entertainment is a game studio delivering very visually appealing mobile games, primarily in the categories “endless runner” and “casual puzzles”.

Asbjørn Søndergaard, Founder & CEO told that initially they left the marketing and monetization via in-app ads to a third party, but things never really took off. When they developed their own marketing platform instead and took back the whole process, revenue started to grow exponentially.
Lesson: Make sure you control your key revenue drivers.

NGH#8 in March or April

The next Nordic Growth Hackers will be in March or April, according to the organizers and initiators behind the Nordic Growth Hackers community, SimpleSite.

Follow the NGH community here: nordicgrowthhackers.com
Twitter: @nordicgrowth

The post Nordic Growth Hackers #7: Your business model is constantly evolving appeared first on Øresund Startups.

The funding is as grants, without any equity stake. The aim of the Market Development Fund is to help startups and enterprises bring new products to the market faster and making it easier for public-sector institutions to obtain innovative solutions. The funding goes to both biotech, cleantech and ICT innovations.

“The latest round of application testify that we in Denmark are skilled to develop good, innovative products – especially in health technology. It is positive for both the welfare and growth, because in the future of health care will be fewer hands to take care of an increasing amount of patients” says Carsten Bjerg from the fund.

Receiving the funding also requires to be partially financed by other sources. In total the Market Development Fund has € 18 M which are granted in 3 phases.

19 projects got funding

Amongst those that got funding are both new startups as well as established ones.

• Inrotech – 3D Adaptive Multipass Welding – € 295 000
• Traede – B2B sales software – market maturation of an innovative and disruptive Retails/B2B trading software – € 415 000
• Immudex – better treatment for Virusinfections – € 400 000
• Penneo – Protecting cloud data against hacking – € 616 000
• Monsenso – Data-driven mHealth platform for treating mental illnesses – € 388 000
• Conferize – Digitalising events and conferences – € 530 000
• EasyCorrect – A tool for helping teachers – € 240 000
• FirstAED – A smartphone based emergency system – € 295 000
• Dripmate – Developing a infusionsregulator – € 280 000
• Kroma – Creating a better fish slaughtering plant – € 450 000
• Nordic Power Converters – Making LEDs more efficient and longer lasting – € 280 000
• Manuxa – Aid for people with grip deficiencies € 470 000
• H.E.W. – Efficient cleaning of supermarket carts – € 240 000
• Voiceboxer – Multilingual Webcast Solution – € 250 000
• MySharps – the smart personal pocket container for disposal of used insulin pen needles – € 200 000
• Planday – Taking employee scheduling online globally – € 316 000
• SiloSense – Making estimations of silos better – € 385 000
• TableBox – A box that enables dining without a table – € 250 000
• VoxIP – Making international roaming cheaper – € 280 000

The entire list with further information and co-financing details can be found here.

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