iGabriel investments announced to date

July 2000

iGabriel’s first investment of GBP415,000 in seed funding was made in Sourceree, the world’s first independent supply chain visibility system being developed to use the power of the Internet to unlock supply chain costs.

iGabriel-sponsoring members for Sourceree, are Charlie Muirhead, Esther Dyson, and Greg Lock.

Ken Lyon, former vice president of International Services for UPS Logistics Group, created the company in February 2000. Sourceree’s management team includes Peter Smart, director of customer services, who is formerly an independent logistics consultant with 25 years of experience, Kumar Vijayaratnam, CTO, formerly head of technical development for Cable & Wireless’ Programming and Content Business Unit, Peter Dingley, CFO, an independent consultant and ex-partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Tony Walford, CEO, formerly managing director of MSAS Global Logistics (UK) Ltd.

Lyon said at the time of the investment: “Today’s global businesses face supply chain costs as high as 22 per cent of sales revenues, as they struggle to manage multiple suppliers, manufacturing operations, third-party distribution providers and sales channels. Beta-test candidates currently reviewing our system expect the visibility it gives to enable those costs to be reduced by up to 80 per cent.”

March 2001

iGabriel invested GBP600,000 as part of a GBP3 million funding round into InterProvider. iGabriel.net members sponsored the deal providing additional funding to the iGabriel.net direct investment. Charles Muirhead and Chris Gare, formally director of Advanced Services at Cable & Wireless, who is also an iGabriel.net member, founded interProvider.

InterProvider will develop Internet Infrastructure Software that will manage relationships between the service providers and automatically and intelligently aggregate the service level reports in one place. Muirhead noted at the time of the investment: “It is only since companies such as Orchestream and Crosskeys have automated the activation and reporting of services within a single network that a proposition that spans multiple networks, like InterProvider’s, is possible. Visibility, and hence trust, of service levels across multiple service providers is critical to the acceptance of the ASP model of outsourcing applications.”

Full details of InterProvider’s solution are expected this summer. InterProvider’s core management team is in place. Dr Sydney O’Hara has been appointed chairman. Dr O’Hara was a managing director of BT, chairman of Cellnet and director of group development Cable & Wireless and is currently a board member of Orchestream plc.