Press Contact
Maria Montgomerie
Manager Corporate Communications
+46 8 587 919 28, +46 70 64 919 28
maria.montgomerie @industrifonden.se
Stockholm, February 17, 2009
Industrifonden invests in Conveneer
Industrifonden and Broken Arrow, a group of American investors, are investing a total of SEK 36 million in Lund, Sweden-based Coveneer, which has developed Mikz, a system that makes the content on mobile phones accessible on the Internet. The money will be used to further develop the technology ahead of its market launch this year.
Mikz makes it possible to give every mobile phone its own web address, e.g., http://joe.mikz.me. In this way, the information and functions currently available on today's mobile phones can easily be reached from various Internet services. Today this is complicated and requires special software, which limits the ability to create new services. Mikz solves this problem, allowing phones to easily be reached through a standard web interface.
"More and more information, such as photos, video and music, is collected in today's mobile phones. The need to easily reach and share this information online is growing constantly," says Lennart Gustafson, Investment Manager at Industrifonden. "Conveneer's unique technology, for which it has a patent pending, makes it possible to utilize Web 2.0 on a mobile phone."
The advantage of the technology is that it uses standard web programming to communicate with mobile phones in real time, regardless of the network. This translates into huge savings in terms of time and cost, minimal risk and unique flexibility when mobile phones are integrated with various web services and corporate solutions.
The key to success is that good applications are available to utilize the mobile phone's accessibility on the Internet. The plan is to encourage application development by making the web interface available to the millions of web developers on the Internet today.
Conveneer, founded in 2006 based on research at Lund University, is still in the development stage. To date, it has been financed by Teknoseed, together with corporate angels. Conveneer currently has around fifteen employees in Lund and Palo Alto, California, but is also represented in South Korea and Japan.
"It is crucial to our development that we attract major investors like Industrifonden and Broken Arrow," says Conveneer CEO Christer Björk. "We now have a group of owners with tremendous competence in both telecommunications and the Internet. With this competence and capital behind us, we can focus on the launch of Mikz this fall."