A win for DFJ Esprit today, the European partner of Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, following the news of a successful acquisition of its portfolio company Redkite Financial Markets by NASDAQ-traded NICE Systems. DFJ Esprit only invested in Redkite in July 2011. Redkite has a real-time software solution for financial market surveillance. DFJ put in $1.14 million into the company but the terms of the sale have not been disclosed. Redkite equips financial institutions with tools to monitor, analyse and act on trading conditions in real-time. This helps detect suspicious transactions and trading behaviour and ultimately identify rogue trading. As you can imagine, it’s the kind of thing that has been pretty hot of late.
The US/Israel-based NICE Systems is continuing an acquisition run from last year after it acquired Fizzback for $80 million, amongst others.
To re-cap, DFJ Esprit has had 16 exits since January 2010 totaling over $2.1 billion, including the sales of LOVEFiLM, Icera, The Cloud, Kiala, EVE and Zeus among others. According to the company this represents 33% of all European Venture-backed M&A exits during that period, which total $6.5bn according to Dow Jones VentureSource (applying to exits over $40m/£25m).
Redkite Financial Markets was established in 2009 to equip financial institutions with the tools and knowledge to better monitor their trading activities in today’s complex market environment.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
