Active year end for Amadeus: Plastic Logic, Network365 and Quadstone investments

Following the October closing of Amadeus II on GBP235 million, almost twice its original target, Amadeus Capital Partners enjoyed an active end to the year. Late November saw a start-up investment of GBP1.75 million in Plastic Logic alongside CRIL and Dow Ventures, swiftly followed by the announcement of fundings for Network365 and Quadstone.

Amadeus led a 15 million funding for Network365, an Irish provider of mobile commerce software products, investing alongside Trinity Venture Capital. Founded in 1999, Network365 develops m-commerce solutions for network operators, service providers, enterprises and applications developers worldwide. Network365’s mZone was the first WAP commerce server to go into live use and has been licensed to mobile network operators and WASPs in a number of countries. Network365 will use the new money to support continuing research and development and to expand its sales, marketing and technical support operations into the Far East and the US.

Network365 is Amadeus’ first investment in Ireland. Amadeus director Richard Anton, who joins the company’s board, says: “We have looked throughout Europe to find an outstanding m-commerce software company and believe that Network365 offers great potential to build a substantial world-class business”.

Amadeus announced the third deal, a GBP21 million private equity financing for Quadstone, in early December.

Quadstone, which originated in Scotland and now operates from offices in Edinburgh, London and Boston, MA, is an analytical CRM software company that provides the most powerful customer behaviour modelling and predictive marketing software currently on the market. Customers for Quadstone’s state-of-the-art software solutions include Barclays Bank, Vodafone, Telenor, Sainsbury’s, Eircom, Fingerhut, M&I Bank, CVS.com, Customerlinx and SmarterKids.com, while Quadstone has established sales, technology and marketing partnerships with groups including ATG, Dialogos, PrimeResponse, Siebel and Webtrends.

Amadeus led an investor syndicate that included Scottish Equity Partners and Standard Life, all existing investors in Quadstone, alongside new investors Chase Capital Partners, Artemis and Friends Ivory & Sime.

The global CRM market is currently growing by at least 50 per cent per annum as businesses increasingly look for a single profile of a customer across all sales points. “This is not just about assembling the data, as in many existing systems, but about making it available to the customer in a form that can be used immediately to predict and influence customer behaviour”, says Amadeus director Hitesh Mehta. “We believe Quadstone’s software leads the market on both counts and, with this major funding, the company is well positioned to build on its competitive advantage”.