Kalido wins award

Kalido has picked up the Corporate Venturing Award, sponsored by Edengene as part of the The National Business Awards 2003. Kalido received its award before an audience of over 1,200 industry professionals at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel.

Kalido was born out of research into data modelling undertaken at Shell in the mid 1990s. Following a working prototype the KALIDO Dynamic Information Warehouse was produced in 1997. This allowed marketing managers unprecedented depth of analysis into products, channels and customers and was quickly rolled out across Shell Lubricants.

Andy Hayler, Kalido’s chief strategist and founder, wrote a business plan to commercialise the software in late 1997, raising some seed money but the project was mostly financed through revenue generated from the new business. By 2000, Unilever Foods became the first external customer, which enabled the team to raise working capital to set the company up on a commercial basis.

The technology, recently awarded a UK patent in May 2003, has initially been applied in the field of data warehousing, a market potentially worth $6bn and the second largest growth area in technology after security.

Tim Thorne, chief executive officer of Edengene, the corporate growth and venturing business and sponsor to the award, says: “Kalido stood out for the success it has achieved, from achieving notable customer wins, significant revenue, and in obtaining one of the largest funding rounds obtained this year from two of the highest-quality players in the venture capital industry.”

The runners up for the corporate venturing award were: BT click&buy, BT Contact Central, Fluency Voice Technology Ltd and Insense Ltd.