Hummingbird Ventures raises new €30 million fund for early stage EMEA startups

The trend in VC over the last couple of years has been towards smaller sized funds which do several, faster investments. Now, new fund Hummingbird Ventures has raised a €30 million ($42 million) venture capital fund for investments in early stage ecommerce and cloud computing companies in the EMEA region, with plenty of emphasis on the “MEA” part of that acronym. Welcome to the party guys.

The investment team behind Hummingbird controlled the funds previously invested by Big Bang Ventures, which invested in DCT (later sold to Symantec) and Qlayer (sold to Sun/Oracle), among a number of other investments. In 2009, Hummingbird was one of the first VC funds to focus on the burgeoning Turkish market, completing four investments in Turkey and the Middle-East and North Africa region.

Barend Van den Brande, managing partner at Hummingbird Ventures, told us: “We succeeded in closing the fund earlier than anticipated. Europe and the Middle East is seeing more and more companies that grow revenues from zero to €100m-plus in only a matter of years.”

As part of its latest round of funding Hummingbird has invested €3.7m in Dacentec as a lead investor. In partnership with Belgacom, the total investment in Dacentec is €6.2m.

Dacentec designs, builds and operates “green” cloud datacentres and also helps partners to build their own cloud facilities. The firm says its datacentres can produce a ‘silver bullet’ by reducing power consumption, and delivering capacity that is more reliable while needing less capex. Kristof De Spiegeleer, who founded Dacentec in 2010, will now assume the position of chairman. Jo Van Gorp, a former executive at Level3 and Telenet, joined as CEO in May this year.

As far as most companies are concerned though cloud is new territory. In a survey by Virgin Media Business of 5,000 UK business owners, 88 percent have yet to deploy cloud-based applications within their company. The key concern is whether their network infrastructure is up to task. So it’s up to Dacentec to convince them otherwise.