Fred Destin

We are thrilled about our latest exit, Spotfire.  Well done to original founder and still CEO Chris Ahlberg.  Chris is a role model for technical founders who can scale all the way, and I hope he will become a great mentor to young entrepreneurs in the future.

In the words of the great Andy Hailer: In a sea of failed visualisation vendors which never seem to catch on properly, Spotfire has a been a rare commercial success.  Andy speculates that TIBCO paid around 4x revenues.

The company was founded in 1996 By Chris and raised its Series A round from Atlas Venture and InnovationsKapital, who seeded the company.  It took additional money from Sprout, Soros and Cooper Hill Partners with the last funding dating from February 2001 (excluding a smaller deal with In-Q-Tel, the CIA / Homeland Security’s investment arm), raising $40m in total.

We don’t really comment on returns but InnovationsKapital was happily commenting on its 9X return in today’s VentureWire.

It’s also a good management story as the combination of vet Rock Gnatovich as President and Chris as CEO is what made the company what it is, together with the great team they assembled.

And finally here is a link to the original 1994 research
Would you have funded it ? :-)

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