Notion Capital, a London, UK-based venture capital firm has held the $100m first close for its second fund focused on emerging Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies in the UK and across Europe.
The total size of Notion Capital Fund 2, which is backed by both the UK government, under its Enterprise Capital Fund programme, and the European Investment Fund, will be up to $150m.
Cloud is a a fast-growing market. According to Gartner, by 2014 the Cloud Computing marketplace will reach $148bn while Cisco Analytics predicts that more than 50% of all workloads will be processed in the Cloud. A recent report by IDC suggests that Cloud Computing will create 14m new jobs by 2015 in terms of how it delivers economic value to countries, cities, industries, and small businesses.
For this reason, Fund 2 aims to identify and support European Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies that can become global leaders and generate exits that can be measured in hundreds of millions.
Commenting on the funding, Stephen Chandler, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Notion Capital, said: “Our strategy is to only invest in what we know (i.e. Cloud Computing and SaaS) and we think this gives us a strong advantage in the market for both evaluating and supporting companies”.
FinSMEs
18/04/2012