Xiam raises €1 million and reduces investors: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2004/08/15 > Xiam raises €1 million and reduces investors

Xiam raises €1 million and reduces investors
Sunday, August 15, 2004

By Gavin Daly
Two venture capital firms that invested several million euro in Dublin software firm Xiam have quit their interest in the company as part of a restructuring.Colm Healy, the chief executive of Xiam, said Add Partners and Vertex Management ``opted to not get involved'' in the company's future. Xiam is now wholly owned by Delta Partners, Enterprise Ireland and its management and staff, according to Healy.

He said Xiam's founders, Robert Baker and Warren Buckley, had also given up their interest in the company.

``This is a positive development, which sets us up very well for the future. The company is now owned by the people who are really involved in it,'' he said.

``Having fewer venture capitalists reduces the overhead of having to manage and liaise with a wide number of investors.''

Healy said the restructuring involved the incorporation of a new company, Xiam Technologies, which is the trading company for Xiam.

Healy, Maurice Roche of Delta, and Xiam's chief technical officer, Hugh O'Donoghue, are the directors of the new company.

It has just raised around €1 million from Delta, the Bank of Ireland Entrepreneurs Fund and three senior executives, including Healy.

Xiam has raised almost €10.5 million since its foundation in 1999, including multi-million-euro investments by Add and Vertex.

Healy said the restructuring did not involve any layoffs. The company employs 25 people and is trading profitably on revenue in the ``low number of millions'', he said.

``We have been trading extremely well since the restructuring, and have signed a range of deals in Europe and Asia. We are a relatively small company, but we have a viable business and will concentrate now on building a bigger viable business.''

Xiam has three software products that allow mobile phone operators and internet service providers to deliver information and content to their customers.

Xiam's customers include O2 Ireland, the Vodafone group, Telenor Interactive and Midwest Wireless in the US, and Impact Mobile in Canada.

Healy said that Xiam had no intention of raising more funding, unless circumstances changed or opportunities for expansion or acquisitions arose. ``We are profitable, and it is now a question of how we develop strategically.

``Our sector is still quite immature, and is pre-consolidation in some ways. Any consolidation we've seen so far is bigger companies buying small firms that ran out of money.''

Xiam's most recent accounts, for the year to the end of June 2002, show that it made a loss of more than €2 million on sales of €1.8 million that year. During that period the company spun out its web services business into a separate company called PolarLake.

PolarLake has since raised €3.2 million in seed funding, and employs 35 people. In June PolarLake signed an exclusive re-seller agreement with Hitachi Systems and Services in Japan that should yield $30 million in sales in the next three years.

``We are delighted that, in a tough time for technology companies, we managed to build Xiam and successfully spin out PolarLake,'' Healy said.

Xiam was founded by Baker, the founder of Baker Consultants, and Buckley, who is now chief technical officer of PolarLake.