We have previously reported on Realm raising there Series B from Khosla Ventures, and on them reaching 1 billion users already a couple of years back. Now it has been announced they have been acquired by MongoDB, reportedly for € 35 million. Considering they had raised a lot of money before, this might not be the best exit for everyone involved. But this is a deal that makes a lot of sense from a technical perspective.

Realm was founded by former developers at Nokia in Copenhagen, which was focused on mobile optimization for phones. They discovered that if you applied similar storage optimization techniques to the back then modern smart-phones, you could make data fit into much less memory, making data access much faster, and removing the need for users to ever see a loading spinner indicator. This core innovation is the foundation of their database technology, and it has helped Realm build a successful company serving the needs of mobile developers.

“Since the early days of Realm, our goal has been to provide better solutions for building modern, mobile-first applications.” says David Ratner, CEO

Currently over 350 customers of varying sizes perform data synchronization between mobile devices and the Cloud via Realm Platform across all regions of the globe.

“We’ve been extremely happy and proud of the growth to date. Realm’s database is used by over 100,000 developers, at companies ranging from small-to-medium to the Fortune 1000.”

Being a part of MongoDB is seen as a great next step for reaching even further.

“MongoDB and Realm are fully committed to investing in the Realm Database and the future of data synchronization, and taking both to the next phase of their evolution. We believe that MongoDB will help accelerate Realm’s product roadmap, go-to-market execution, and support our customers’ use cases at a whole new level of global operational scale.”

The aim is that the combination of MongoDB and Realm will establish the modern standard for mobile application development and data synchronization. Something that is fitting for a new generation of connected applications and services.

“MongoDB and Realm share a common goal and vision of providing the best possible solution for developers to work with data and accelerate innovation. We believe this announcement is a big step to accelerate the vision of Realm and support our community and customers at a new scale.”

For additional information about this see this page.

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The Grand Finale of Nordic Startup Awards was held Tuesday evening in the beautiful, Danish designed Harpa Concert Hall in the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik.

The winners

The evening’s main award, Startup of the Year, went to Danish Realm.io, a database used on 1 billion mobile devices worldwide.

The award for Best Exponential Startup went to the Danish payment institution Clearhaus, a competitor to Nets.

Copenhagens Rainmaking Loft won the Best Office Space award.

“It is a great honor, and we will celebrate the prize with the team. This would not have been possible without a tough and consistent team effort.” said Brian Munkholm, VP Engineering at Realm.io

“All countries have presented high quality candidates and there is a good balance between B2B and B2C companies, also characterized by being extremely scalable.” said Kim Balle, CEO and Co-Founder of Nordic Startup Awards

At the Grand Finale of the Nordic Startup Awards the three Danish winners fought against the national winners from Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. A total of 14 awards was given.

All the evening’s 14 winners

• Startup of the Year: Realm.io (Denmark)
• Best Exponential Startup: Clearhaus (Denmark)
• Best Office Space: Rainmaking Loft (Denmark)
• People’s Choice: Medilync (Iceland)
• Best Newcomer: Universal Avenue (Sweden)
• Best Bootstrapped: Catchbox (Finland)
• Best IoT Startup: 720° (Finland)
• Best Social Tech Startup: Karolina Fund (Iceland)
• Best Accelerator Program: STING Accelerate (Sweden)
• Best Investment Company: Northzone (Sweden)
• Startup Media of the Year: Arctic Startup (Finland)
• CTO Hero of the Year: Umut Alp (Truecaller) (Sweden)
• Founder of the Year: Are Traasdahl (Tapad) (Norway)
• Best Business Angel: Moaffak Ahmed (Finland)

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Reaching this scale is rare the only a few other startup in this region that has attained this, most recently Unity.

100 000 Active Developers

More than 100 000 active developers now use Realm. This number is expected to grow rapidly as 1.0 designates a highly stable API and Realm’s widespread market adoption shows developer confidence in the platform. Every month more apps are built on Realm’s mobile data platform than competing solutions offered by IBM, Microsoft, Amazon or Google. Realm currently reports growth twice as fast as Microsoft-owned Xamarin, Adobe PhoneGap, Unity, and others.

Realm reaches version 1.0

After two years, Realm has launched a 1.0 version of its product for iOS and Android as it reaches a key stage of maturity and stability. The 1.0 version include things like a notification system that allows developers to build reactive apps easily, full support for the latest versions of Apple’s Swift language and intuitive Java modeling, for even more flexible object interfaces.

Realm was founded by Alexander Stigsen (CEO) and Bjarne Christiansen (COO), childhood friends from Copenhagen who were developers at Nokia, where they worked on optimizing data storage for the plastic bar phones we all spent too much time playing snake on. They discovered that if you applied similar storage optimization techniques to modern smart phones, you could make data fit into much less memory, making data access much faster, and forever removing the need for users to ever see a loading spinner indicator. This core innovation is the foundation of their database technology, and it has helped Realm build a successful company serving the needs of mobile developers at startups like Hipmunk to enterprise companies like Google.

Realm entered YCombinator in the summer 2011, and has since had great success, being backed by Khosla Ventures, Scale VP, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Redpoint, Ignition, SVAngel, Crunchfund & many more. Realm i headquartered in San Fransisco, but still has activities and an office in Copenhagen, where they also are currently hiring.

The post Realm reaches 1 billion users appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

“It is a great honor, and we will celebrate the prize with the team. This would not have been possible without a tough and consistent team effort.” said Brian Munkholm, VP Engineering in Realm.io.

Ideanote, an innovation tool for businesses, founded by some young guys in their 20s, was awarded the People’s Choice and Best Newcomer Award.

“It is great to receive the recognition and it will certainly motivate the whole team, since we are still working hard to get ahead. We started in a basement, and now we are 16 people.” said Jesper Juul Jensen, CEO of Ideanote.

The Danish winners face the winners from Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland at the Grand Finale of Nordic Startup Awards in Reykjavik on the 31st of May.

The evening’s 14 danish winners

• Startup of the Year: Realm.io
• People’s Choice: Ideanote
• Best Newcomer: Ideanote
• Best Bootstrapped: Tiny Rebels
• Best Exponential Startup: Clearhaus
• Best IoT Startup: Sensohive
• Best Social Tech Startup: Reshopper
• Best Office Space: Rainmaking Loft
• Best Accelerator Program: Next Step Challenge
• Best Investment Company: Northcap
• Startup Media of the Year: DR – Løvens Hule
• CTO Hero of the Year: Brian Munkholm (Realm.io)
• Founder of the Year: Theis Søndergaard (Vivino)
• Best Business Angel: Tommy Ahlers

Both traditional industry and government officials present

The Minister of Business and Growth, Troels Lund Poulsen, presented the award for Startup of the Year:

“Even the largest Danish companies started as small ones, and it is important that we support the startup environment so that entrepreneurs’ ideas have the best chances of becoming fully fledged companies, and maybe one day the future Danish industrial giants.” he said.

By hosting the show, DI hopes to help focusing attention on startups.

“DI is not only for well-established companies, and Nordic Startup Awards helps focusing on Denmark’s future business successes. Even in a small country ideas can become global successes. It increases awareness of Denmark and makes it easier to attract talents and investors.” said Adam Lebech, industry sector executive for DI Digital.

Third Nordic Startup Awards

The aim with Nordic Startup Awards is to inspire, encourage and recognize entrepreneurship in the Nordic region. It happens not only by honouring the most successful startups, but by focusing on the entire environment – from the investors and journalists to the founders and developers.
Nordic Startup Awards honours the most successful startups from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland for the third time. At the grand finale show the winning startups from each country will compete in 14 categories. Until February, the public could nominate their favorites. From receiving 550 nominations in 2015, Nordic Startup Awards has experienced great interest and received 737 nominations this year.

“The interest has been enormous, and the concept has spread to Southeast Asia, India and Central Europe. The whole thing is started and controlled from Denmark, helping to brand the Nordic region as an alternative to Silicon Valley and attract even more of the talents that the startup industry crave.” says Kim Balle, CEO of Nordic Startup Awards.

Impressions from others

Lots of networking at Nordic Startup Awards in Industriens Hus #nsawards #vindfremtiden pic.twitter.com/2E8HQAlzcQ

— Anders Sparre (@asparre) May 3, 2016

It has been a great year for Startupvillage. We are celebrating together with all of you, guys. Amazing work pic.twitter.com/RJb9UOrJjP

— Founders House (@foundershouse) May 3, 2016

Vivino's @tjesboogie won the Danish Founder of the Year at the Nordic Startup Awards! #nsawards #nordicmade https://t.co/sxY49ZKcL8

— Vivino (@vivino) May 3, 2016

Founder of the Year @tjesboogie er ikke stor, men han har tyngde #nsawards pic.twitter.com/52XSd0kRgW

— Anders Sparre (@asparre) May 3, 2016

The post Here are the winners of Nordic Startup Awards Danish Edition 2016 appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Realm was founded by Alexander Stigsen and Bjarne Christiansen, under the name of ThightDB. Alexander and Bjarne are childhood friends who were developers at Nokia in Copenhagen, where they worked on optimizing data storage for the plastic bar phones we all spent too much time playing snake on. They discovered that if you applied similar storage optimization techniques to modern smart phones, you could make data fit into much less memory, making data access much faster, and forever removing the need for users to ever see a loading spinner indicator. This core innovation is the foundation of their database technology, and it has helped Realm build a successful company serving the needs of mobile developers.

Speedy Mobile Database

Realm’s product is a database, similar to Oracle, MySQL or MongoDB, but it runs directly inside your phone, tablet or smartwatch. It uses a brand-new storage architecture, not SQLite, and an easier API designed for needs of modern mobile apps and smartphones. It is already used by tens of thousands of app makers around the world, including Groupon, Buzzfeed, Intuit, Rite Aid, Zynga, Coinbase, Expensify, Wahoo Fitness, as well as Fortune 500 corporations, banks, healthcare providers and many more.

“The legacy standard for mobile databases, SQLite, was designed over 15 years ago for use on board the US Navy’s guided missile destroyers. The phrase ‘platform shift’ does not begin to adequately capture the difference between that environment and a modern cell phone.” says Andy Vitus, Partner at Scale VP

Andy Vitus will join the board with the investment, as well as David Helgason, founder of Unity.

“Launching a successful mobile platform requires solving the hard problems developers really care about, in a really awesome package. I’m excited to join the board a great company that is doing for databases what Unity did for game engines: bringing them head-first into the mobile century.” says Davíd Helgason

Realm was part of the YCombinator Summer 2011 batch. The startup has raised € 26 M of funding to date and has grown to 21 employees. Even if headquartered in the U.S., Realm has also a presence in the Copenhagen startup community. It is amongst one of the founding startups for the cphftw foundation and has it’s office in Founders House. With David Helgason on the board the connection to Copenhagen is also strengthened further.

Plans for the future

Realm will use this round to continue supporting iOS & Android developers, who have switched to its database en masse since it was first publicly released in July of last year. The funding will also help Realm to add support for more mobile platforms.

“This investment helps us fulfill our goals of modernizing the way we handle data on mobile, and making life easier for millions of mobile app developers. Khosla Ventures has been great partners in this journey and we look forward to expanding our relationship with them and introducing Scale Venture Partners to the mix.” says Alexander Stigsen

Alexander says Realm also has plans to double its team size around the globe in 2015, and especially ramp up the sales of its enterprise products and services.

The post Realm raises € 18 M Series B from Khosla Ventures & Scale VP to bring Databases to Mobile appeared first on Øresund Startup News.

Above you can see the some footage of the opening ceremony, where Zenia Francker from Founders House held the inauguration talk.

Founders house is a initiative where some of the most successful startups from Copenhagen have co-located in the same block. Startup Village is located at Islands Brygge on Njalsgade, in the old pakhusen. Some of the startups have had their offices there for a while already, but with the latest startups moving there the idea of branding it as Startup Village was born.

The houses are 4 old warehouses remodeled by a local floor marking contractor, with some startups having smaller spaces and some entire floors. It is a distinct historical area with great flavour and both indoor as well as outdoor locations.

Entrepreneurial initiative

Behind the initiative are the different startups, with Founders House moving there being one of the driving factors. It is a completly private initiative, with the aim of helping all startups located in the village. Somewhat ironically, the business department of the Copenhagen Municipallity actually had their offices just next door, until they moved to a new location, this summer.

Startups present

Some of the biggest startups present in the Startup Village are:

• Autobutler
• Bellmetric
• Churchweb
• Conferize
• Everplace
• Graduateland
• Labster
• Nabby
• Opbeat
• Planday
• Riidr
• Realm
• Shape
• Vivino

With the Founders House co-working space there are also a larger number of smaller and newer startups present.

Not just startups

The village also includes a café and a restaurant, as well as a Yoga center. Some ‘regular’ companies are present on the premises as well, such as White Arcitects office, as the this has rather been a gradual growing conglomeration of startups and not a top-down planned takeover, such as Berlin Factory. The idea is however to enable further startups to move there, with the assistance of a service like business moving services, as soon as floor-space becomes available.

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A goal and more structure

The first half of the event was focused on giving the participants a chance to speak out and an update on the structure of the initiative.
It was presented that Jasenko Hadzic and Lærke Ullerup will form the operational team, with Jasenko being the official Managing Director. Jasenko is, as previsouly stated, known in the community, and Lærke has a past at TEDxCPH and has been involved in the #cphftw initiative since its initial phase.

Also, it’s goals of #cphftw were presented. These are:

• To make Denmark the most attractive startup hub in Europe
• To increase relations amongst community leaders and entrepreneurs in the ecosystem
• To to increase international exposure, benefiting the Denmark and the Danish economy

How to do it

But it is not just about what the goals are, even more important are how to do it. Here some concrete actions were announced:

Connecting the ecosystem

A couple of initiatives were presented about how to move things forward. Amongst other through dedicated meet ups for C-level employees at startups. People who often have a huge experience and can share information with others. But also with founders dinners and a mailing list for entrepreneurs.

Making the ecosystem visible

This mainly through an online platform, over at cphftw.dk, which should make it easy to get an overview of what happens, and also highlight interesting stories. Also, making the eco-system visible to media to a larger extend.

Connecting Copenhagen to the world

8 exclusive investors dinners with all major Nothern European VCs. Also, actively working with other hubs such as Stockholm, Helsinki and Berlin to drive learning across borders.

Also, all founding startups were announced as well, having pledged over 500 000 DKK to the initiative so far – it should be noted that at the event it was mentioned that the number was 400.000 DKK, but the sign-ups have been flying in ever since the evening.

It was also mentioned that the all startups have the chance of becoming founding members of #cphftw, were the goal is to get 80+ on board until end the week. If you want your startup to join in and forever be known as one of the founding members, reach out to Jasenko directly.

What is happening in Copenhagen

Besides those great news about the initiative itself, the second part was all about startups and events happening in Copenhagen.

It was set up as quick series of mini-presentations. A chance for all assembled to know about some impress startups or happenings. here were a lot of quick presentations and announcement. 6 startups were presented, as well as over 10 different initiatives from the community.

For outsiders, one of the most interesting parts were all the different initiatives that are going on.

Community initiatives and events

Here multiple places, initiatives and events were presented. All very interesting in their own, but too much to cover in depth. Amongst them were:

• Jacob Bøtter told the story about Prototype, and it’s strange mixture of co-working and coffeeshop
• Michael Tiberg talked about Foo Café, how he managed to host over 300 tech events last year in Malmö, and about opening a Foo Café in Copenhagen.
• CIID, the Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design – Alie Rose, talked about bringing together people from all over the world to work on interaction and development projects. A great pool for talent.
• Lars Buch from StartupBootcamp came and brought a lot of energy – enforcing that we need to celebrate the people who are doing this.
• Lean Startup Circle was presented, and that they will host multiple events in the fall, using their 950+ strong meet-up group to bring great minds together, and above all focus on actual learnings and testing.
• Michael Reibel Boesen presented Elevate, which is kind of a job fair for getting students exposed to startups. A great initiative.
• Camilla Ley Valentin from Queue-it talked about her involvement with the danish goverment in the enklereregler.dk initiative – making regulations easier. She highlighted that everyone should send in their growth barriers before the October 3rd, and she would present them to the government.
• Henrik Føhns from Harddisken, the program from Danish Public Radio 1, was on stage and talked about his job of distributing the future more evenly – using one hour of public radio a week for interviews and the tech scene.
• Morten Elk from SimpleSite presented his initiative: Nordic Growth Hackers meet-ups. The events will focus in real learnings – 6 cases with growth hacking will be presented. The first meet-up is in october at Founders House.

Startup presentations

6 startups got 3 minutes each. The startups were from different levels – from really successful ones to smaller ones that recently have had successes.

Sitecore

“Before Sitecore I started multiple non-profits. Although I never intended them to be non-profit…”

Was one of the quotes from Lars Fløe Nielsen who presented his company. A company that might be the ‘biggest unknown startup’ in Copenhagen. Having had organic growth to over 800 employees and hundreds of millions in revenue, it surely is a very impressive company he has build.

Shipbeat

“A startup is about a team”

Was one of the widsoms Kenneth Svenningsen from Shipbeat shared. The logistics as a service startup has recently closed an impressive seed-round.

“I didn’t want to do this. But my past experience from Rocket Internet in Sydney and Miinto I realisted there was no good solution for this”

Kenneth said about his startup idea.

Crowdcurity

Jacob Hansen from Crowdcurity talked about how they are solving security problems for companies.

“We are Backed by 1000 of security researchers world wide. “

Apart from their journey so far with boost.vc and 500 startups, he also mentioned current progress:

“The bitcoin marked is currently one of our focus areas, we get a lot of interest from companies active there.”

Komfo

Michael talked about Komfo and how they are now competing against Adobe social, Meltwater and a lot of the same competitors as Lars from Sitecore mentioned previously. Komfo and Sitecore also have a long relationship already.

“We wanted an organic growth, and took Sitecore as a strategic investor instead of venture capital.”

Realm (former tightDB)

Brian Munkholm presented his startup. They are currently 16 employees, half of them in Silicon Valley.
Their service: a very fast database tool. He mentioned that they are proud that it was released one month ago, already 1700 stars on GitHub.

Conferize

Jesper Vestergaard introduced the startup, and their ambition to make conferences more digital and forming a community around them. They have just released their new product.

“We 12 people working at conferize right now. Looking for more”

Jesper he hinted. He also made a pledge: If you have a free event in Copenhagen you can use the Conferize without any costs.

Podio

The last one is not a startup anymore, since their exit to Citrix in 2012. However, Kasper Hulthin talked about their journey 2009-2012. But also talked about how they have worked to get Citrix to make the Podio office a hub for their development, and getting the company to make it’s presence in the region stronger. An effort that was applauded to!

The presentations were all quick, and gave a sense of some of the interesting startups in Copenhagen. They also showed a clear trend – it’s the b2b sector startups that this region rocks at building.

Conclusions

Apart from all this there were even more short presentations and speeches. It was, in total, a really packed event with a lot of information shared. After all the presentations the bar, staffed by employees from the startup 23, was open and a lot of new connections made. A lot of suggestions and ideas also spread thru twitter on the #cphftw hashtag, were already new plans for sharing more knowledge were taking shape.

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The new location, at Islands Brygge, will thus form a new innovative tech hub – dubbed the Startup Village Copenhagen.

Old warehouses turned into startups heaven

Islands Brygge’s historic warehouses marked by experts you can aslo hire if you click here used to be the headquarters of FDB, who stored and transported products to all of Denmark via direct tracks to Copenhagen Harbor. In recent years, the area has increasingly become the home of tech startups, and now that is accelerated. As of this summer, the area in Njalsgade will be the frame around Copenhagen’s biggest concentration of fast-growing startups, including the estabished startups Vivino, Opbeat, Graduateland and Autobutler, as well as over 15 other both early and later stage startups!

A real hub for startups

Having all these ambitious startups with offices side by side increase knowledge-sharing and in turn speeds up growth of the individual companies. All serious tech startups are welcome, both to take up offices at Njalsgade, now called Startup Village, and to join the many tech events and social stuff arranged so people can network, do business and have fun. Founders House will with it’s move also expand, so talk to them if you are a smaller startup and want to be part of their co-working area.

A grass-roots initiative

The entire idea behind the Startup Village comes from the community itself. In contrast to many other projects, this is not a government sponsored place or initiative, but rater it is the different startups realizing that they could create an area that they would love themselves. This is a similar trend seen elsewhere, with Berlins Factory (also to be opened this summer) being a similar initiative.

With both the established startups being there, and Founders House with its often earlier stage startups as well as smaller startups in their own offices, the Village will be a space for both startups that are just getting going, as well as later stage ones that have raised a successful series A or even a series B investment. The Village will also be a natural place for international startups establishing a Scandinavian presence to be located – something that already is apperent on the list of the initial startups forming the Startup Village!

All in all, a great step for the community to have that much knowledge in one place!

Startups present

The spaces are being put in shape now, and the inaugurations is set for the 29th of August. The following startups have said will be part of the Startup Village CPH when it starts:

• Shape
• Vivino
• Conferize
• Opbeat
• Graduateland
• Birdback
• Nabby
• TightDB
• Boligsurf
• Anker Studio
• Everplaces
• Kirkeweb
• Codeable.io
• HelloWorldMobile
• Labster
• BodyBarista
• MeeWee
• Riidr
• Pinstriped
• Pocket Risk
• SNIPS
• 8pen
• Bellmetric
• Autobutler
• Planday
• Hello Monday
• Driversnote

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