Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

This is one of the largest European venture funds raised in the last five years which, added to the Amadeus & Angels Seed fund of $19m (£10m), raised at the end of 2006, provides Amadeus with more than $330m for investment in European technology businesses.

The firm said that, like its predecessor funds, the third fund would back entrepreneurs and teams developing ‘disruptive’ technologies that either offer new ways of fulfilling existing functions or enable completely new functions. The focus is on fabless semiconductors, wireless technologies, med-tech, digital media, software and services.

Amadeus backs companies from seed stage through to later stage expansion, providing several rounds of finance and bringing in other venture capitalists with relevant expertise or geographic presence for each company’s development.

Amadeus maintains strong networks in universities and technology clusters across Europe, and has spun out a number of companies from university research laboratories. The investment team of 16, comprising ten nationalities, is led by Anne Glover and Hermann Hauser.

Trade sales to date include Element 14, Entropic, and End2End, with IPOs including CSR, Optos, lastminute.com, and SPI Lasers.

Amadeus’ Cambridge-based investess include CSR the world leader in bluetooth chip technology, in which Amadeus was a founding investor; Plastic Logic which leads the world in the field of plastic electronics, which Amadeus seed financed and which recently raised $100m to build its first facility and Solexa, which recently merged with Illumina in a $600m transaction creating the world’s leading genetic analysis business.

CEO Anne Glover said: “Technology is now completely global so it doesn’t matter where a company is founded, based or financed as long as it thinks globally. Companies like CSR and Skype are proof of that. Our deal flow is strong and of high quality and we look forward to investing Amadeus III and our seed fund over the next few years.”

Amadeus III investors, over 70 whom of whom are based outside the UK, include Access Capital Partners, Adams Street Partners, Alpinvest Partners NV, Bank of Scotland, Capital Dynamics, European Investment Fund, Parish Capital Advisors Europe, Pantheon Ventures and Partners Group.