Finnish computer security provider F-Secure has acquired venture-backed French startup Steek for €27.5M in cash with the possibility of a further performance-based payment of up to €2.5M next year.
Steek was backed by Innovacom, which financed the startup’s $4 million Series A round mid-2006 (currently converts to €2.8 million) and later joined AGF Private Equity in a $8 million Series B round (now approx. €5.7 million).
Steek offers integrated online multimedia data storage, file sharing, and automated backup solutions to individuals and SMEs. More interesting for F-Secure however is that fact that the startup boasts a strong white label operator partner network that includes major corporations like SFR (France), Virgin Media (UK), Singtel (Singapore) and Terra (Spain).
In a press release, Steek claims more than 2.2 million current active users for its services in total. The company added that it employs 50 people and saw 2008 revenues of €2.5 million with a net loss of €700,000.
Sleek will be consolidated to the F-Secure Group from the beginning of July 2009. The Group noted that it expects revenues to improve by an estimated €2-3 million and be slightly EPS dilutive. Long term, its management believes the acquisition will improve its revenues more significantly and estimates it to be EPS accretive next year already.
Looks like a great deal. Congratulations to Steek and F Secure. Let’s see more good news soon.
Interesting just on the grounds that they made a net loss of 700k Euros and still managed to negotiate a company sale.
Publish the twitter docs!! I m waiting…
Congratulations to Steek and F Secure… hope it ll prove to b a good deal
Good to see decent valuations again, especially in the European Market, all our hard work here at ExSafe.net is not in vein.
good return in a short space of time
Wondering for how much Wuala was sold to LaCie? Any whistle blowers?
Considering that Wuala wasn’t profitable either, I’d assume they got between 5-10 million US$.
(I also wonder how a company selling online storage can employ 50 people like Steek. That’s measly 50′000 Euro revenue per head.)
It is also clear that going whitelabeling after ISP and telco could be a good strategy!
LaCie probably made the better deal. Remember that Steek is a french company, like LaCie. It’s safe to assume that LaCie knows Steek’s story better than F-Secure does. If Steek were worth that much money, LaCie wouldn’t have bought Wuala instead.
Good news for Steek. The numbers don’t add up though. They have more than 2 million users and their revenue is only $2M! Also their web traffic is very low.
I guess we can look forward to more soon