After a period of radio silence, due to several exciting projects, we are back with this Spring-period Newsletter.
Spring is in the air and that not only translates into sunny weather but also several cheerful announcements around new investments and a couple of divestments that we’ve made over the previous period. Last year we’ve refined our fund strategy, extended our fund mandate, made several new investments, provided seven portfolio companies with follow-on investments and realized multiple exits. Last year six companies have been added to our portfolio via direct investments supplemented by two fund investments. Amongst those six the latest investments were in two promising companies that are active in the field of educational content subscription services for students and cybersecurity scenario training, Perlego and RangeForce respectively.
While making investment decisions we always keep divestment scenarios in mind since it is – next to the strategic value we aim to deliver to KPN business units through revenue enhancing partnerships – also the objective to generate an outstanding financial return via the sale of our stake in our portfolio companies. The exits we have realized in 2022 and the first months of 2023 include Cybersprint, ZecOps and Cloudify.
With already several new investments and exits in the pipeline, 2023 is looking very promising and we aim to continue this trend in the years ahead!
We are delighted to share with you one of our latest investments, namely Perlego. Perlego is on a bold mission to make education available to all, with accessibility, affordability, and sustainability at its core. Perlego is the world’s largest online educational content subscription service for students, aggregating the content of the majority of global publishers through an all-you-can-read subscription model.
Perlego offers its so-called ‘all-you-can-read’ subscription model to students – either directly (B2C) or indirectly via universities and higher education institutions (B2B2C). It offers unlimited access to over 1,000,000 curriculum relevant textbooks and built-in study tools. These are available on any device, anywhere, and anytime to its subscribers for a monthly fee. Perlego will be a great addition to KPN´s portfolio in the Consumer Market including Netflix, Spotify and Disney+.
KPN Ventures joins amongst others Mediahuis, ACE & Company, The Raine Group, Tech Nation, Evli growth partners and some exceptional business angels in the Perlego shareholder base and is looking forward to be working with the talented management team of Gauthier van Malderen and Matt Davis.
Cybersecurity, but a completely different area of cybersecurity than we have invested in so far. Excited to announce our investment in RangeForce. RangeForce enables security & IT managers to track, train and upskill their workforce through training modules and realistic simulations/scenarios via its cyber defense readiness SaaS-platform.
RangeForce offers a development platform that is focused on gaining cyber skills ‘by doing’ for individuals and teams. A unique combination that allows CISOs and heads of security teams to assess their teams, spot gaps in knowledge and skills, provide individual learning paths, team exercises and help assessing new hires. The modules and exercises are constantly updated to provide a broad range of relevant topics (e.g., phishing, ransomware) and tooling (e.g., SentinelOne, Elastic, Splunk). The environment is easily accessed via every web browser and provides realistic simulations. The solution is very cost efficient compared to competitors in the skills development space but also compared to institutes and cyber ranges. RangeForce will be an important tool for both KPN employees as well as KPN’s (larger) business customers.
KPN Ventures joins amongst others EIP, Paladin Capital Group, Cisco Investments and Techstars in the RangeForce shareholder base and is looking forward to be working with the great management team of Taavi Must and Margus Ernits.
Censornet’s Autonomous Integrated Cloud Security platform integrates best-in-class email security, web security, cloud application security (CASB) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions into one line of defense. Our portfolio company Censornet has already delivered strong growth through MSPs and by effective cooperation with channel partners. Therefore, we are delighted to announce the launch of the Censornet solution in KPN’s SME customer portfolio and looking forward to intensifying cooperation between KPN and Censornet even further.
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