Many entrepreneurs who muzzle through a successful exit use some of the proceeds to become an angel investor and help other startups get, well, started.
And that’s not exclusively a Silicon Valley thing.
Stockholm, Sweden-based Mobile Sorcery has just raised an early-stage investment round amounting up to 1.5 million Swedish Kronor (approximately €145k or $206k USD), for the most part coming from MySQL founders David Axmark and Michael Widenius. Update: the company let us know the reports about the amount of funding are wrong. Although they won’t disclose a number, they informed TechCrunch that the financing round was actually much larger than 1.5 million Swedish Kronor.
You may remember MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems back in January 2008 for approximately $1 billion after raising only $39 million in venture capital. It’s safe to say both co-founders walked away with enough cash to use some of it for angel investment in promising companies.
This was actually Mobile Sorcery’s second seed round; it had earlier raised money from STING (Stockholm Innovation and Growth) Capital private equity fund, which also participated in this round. Mobile Sorcery CEO Tomas Uppgård tells ArcticStartup that it exercised a lot of patience before finding someone to fund the startup, but will likely continue to seek follow-up investment in the near future.
Mobile Sorcery, founded in late 2004, specializes in cross-platform development technology for mobile applications, which is obviously not the worst market to operate in these days. Its flagship product is MoSync 2.0, an SDK that enables developers to transforms C / C++ code to mobile platforms such as Java, Symbian and Windows Mobile environments. The fledgling companies plans to open-source the platform later this year, and support for the Android and iPhone platform is said to be underway as well.