Industry Group Meeting Report

Mega-cities, dead fish and pre-revenue exits – the show at Södra Teatern had it all…

We checked around before this event what members would bring and where happy to hear about exits, investment cases and eagerness to invest in new companies. Since we had no manned wardrobe the only worrying thing was one VC who said they would bring 1,100 k allocated for new investments, half in cash! It all worked out however, they left the money in the bank account at least for a little while.

SKANSKA
The construction industry is at the center of urbanisation and megacities and also a very common target customer for cleantech companies. For these reasons we had the pleasure to hear Johan Gerklev of Skanska, one of the worlds top ten construction companies and with aspirations to be the greenest of them all, talk about what it takes to make into their projects. Johan gave us a great and very initiated overview and made it very clear that cleantech solutions are in high demand at building sites across Europe and in the US. He also pointed to the process you need to go trough before anything makes it into one of their projects, which is in short: no walk in the city park. We moved on to let the industrials in the room talk about their current R&D focus giving the audience a cleantech market survey at the same time.

30 cases by 30 members!
A purpose of this event was for members to bring up investment cases and there was no shortage of it, close to 30 upcoming deals where announced, spanning everything from agriculture, transport, new materials, wave, wind, solar, fuel-cells. It was fun to hear investors pitch their cases, noticeable they say what they know others in the room want to hear straight away – what does the company do for which market, how is it unique and how is it doing, financially as well as operationally.

Exits and Acquisitions can’t have one without the other!
TranSic is Cleantech company that was sold pre-revenues to an industrial American actor. The recepie for a successful exit was laid out with a smiling face – invest in the right company, find the right buyer and negotiate the right price. Easy to say, and as the story unfolded, not as easy to do. An inspiring and very wanted exit story nevertheless and we congratulate Stefan Jakélius and Industrifonden to a return of 50%!

Also present was BASF, which recently acquired Inge watertechnologies, a high profile case involving a number of well-known investors. Bernhard Mohr of BASF Venture Capital shared some insights the transaction before other industrials and investors talked about the current exit climate.

Thank you all for participating, and as it really was in this case, contributing to a great event!

Alexander Lidgren, director of “Cleantech Scandinavia at Södran”.