Industry Venture capital Founder Niklas Zennström Number of employees 20 | Website www.atomico.com Founded 2006 Type of business Private | |
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Products Venture capital, growth capital Profiles | ||
Great companies can come from anywhere by co founder of atomico mattias ljungman
Atomico is an international technology investment firm headquartered in London, with offices in Beijing, Istanbul, São Paulo, and Tokyo. Its founder and CEO is Niklas Zennström, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Skype and Kazaa. The team includes Chris Barnes, Yann De Vries, Mattias Ljungman, Hiro Tamura and Teddi Wardi.
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Focus
The company focuses on new consumer technologies that have the potential to transform markets, and places an emphasis on strong management. Zennström has stated that he founded the company in 2006 after "seeing that new technology would disrupt not just consumer markets, but the venture-capital industry itself".
It has invested in more than fifty companies on three continents via three funds, Atomico Ventures I, the $165 million Atomico Ventures II and, most recently, Atomico III, which closed at $476 million in November 2013.
The company has been involved with exits or substantial transactions in companies including Supercell (sold a majority stake to SoftBank, valuing the business at $3 billion in 2013), The Climate Corporation (acquired by Monsanto for $1.1 billion in 2013), Xobni (acquired by Yahoo! in 2013) and PowerReviews (acquired by Bazaarvoice in 2012).
The company publicly states that it has an active approach to deal sourcing. Atomico runs an Open Office programme, in which the company visits cities around the world six to eight times a year searching for investments, and usually involving talks by Zennström to university students. He urges aspiring entrepreneurs to look for large market opportunities.
In some deals Atomico invests alongside other investors, such as when it partnered with Accel Partners in March 2011 to lead a $42 million funding round in Rovio Mobile. and its February 2011 investment in Fon.
Investments
The firm's investments include