Furnishing the world: an exit for global expansion
The Turkish start-up scene continues to be a source of successful European founders and talents. In July, we celebrated another major milestone: our portfolio-company Vivense secured a USD 130m investment from Turkish private equity fund, Actera Group. Vivense is a Turkish online marketplace for furniture that used the funding to further fuel the company’s continued growth in Turkey and ignite its global expansion plans, starting from the UK this year.
The deal also marked the first sizable VC-to-PE exit in the region this year. Digital East Fund (ex-Earlybird) was one of the first investors of Vivense. Partners Evren Ucok, Cem Sertoglu and Mehmet Atici accompanied Vivense CEO Kemal Erol and his team on their journey from the very beginning. Congrats to Vivense on their success story!
Geographic distribution? No problem.
With the advancement of team communication and collaboration tools like Slack and Zoom, companies can thrive while being geographically dispersed - even on an executive level. Our portfolio company Hazelcast is a prime example: HQ is in San Mateo, CA while R&D is in Istanbul, Turkey and Brno, Czech Republic. Additional developers are stationed in several other countries while technical product management is run out of London, and the VP of Engineering is based in Denmark. (This makes for interesting meetings in Bermuda, the only place on the planet where all members of the geographically distributed executive team could meet without a quarantine.)
Hazelcast has come a long way since 2011, when our Digital East Fund (ex-Earlybird) team discovered a handful of world-class developers in a technology park in Gebze, just outside of Istanbul, who had built a global network of contributors to their open-source, in-memory data grid project which already had Morgan Stanley and Cisco clamouring for their software. In 2014, we invested.
Fast forward to early February 2020, when Hazelcast completed a USD 50m financing from new investors such as C5 Capital, EBRD and DEG in order to accelerate its development and growth. Now they empower global 2000 enterprises to achieve ultra-fast application performance — at any scale.
Streaming the Year’s Biggest Pay Per View Show
Live sports distributors worldwide faced serious logistical challenges due to the pandemic. The digital platform, FITE, an early investment of our Digital East Fund (ex-Earlybird), embraced the sudden mass migration to streaming. The combat sports platform doubled down on its efforts to acquire bigger events and partnerships and added new content verticals in soccer, music and motorsports.
Not everyone saw the Tyson-Jones PPV matchup as a viable event presented by Triller, a new music social media app, but FITE sensed this could become a highly symbiotic relationship. As the exclusive US digital distributor, FITE powered Triller’s microsite as well as FITE’s impressive online, mobile, smart TV and OTT streaming ecosystem and became the #1 grossing app in the world on fight weekend, growing its registered user base to 4M users. The event itself was a blockbuster with 1.6m buys and a whopping $80m in growth revenue. This makes it the biggest one in 2020, the 8th most purchased PPV in history, and the most purchased PPV via digital ever.