2013 has finished, these have been the main exits in Europe and Spain

2 min reading
12 December 2013
2013 has finished, these have been the main exits in Europe and Spain

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We are approaching the end of 2013, which is a year that has been very important for consolidating Europe as a center of innovation and entrepreneurship on a global scale. A way of measuring the health of the sector is by analyzing the exits, the sale of technology companies that usually have a positive effect in different ecosystems.

It is the snake that bites its tail: some entrepreneurs create a startup that receives (or not) the investment of Venture Capital funds; a larger company becomes interested in buying the startup and ends up buying it; entrepreneurs and investors may receive capital gains that, months or years later, they reinvest in other startups. A vicious cycle that is key to the maturation of the industry and in 2013 has been represented by the following operations.

Europe

1. The Japanese firm SoftBank bought 51% of Supercell, mobile game developer, for $1.5 billion.

2. The exits do not always have to materialize in selling businesses. Another option for entrepreneurs is to make their companies go public. This was the case of the French firm Criteo, which started trading on the Nasdaq a few weeks ago and was valued at more than $2 billion.

3. Germany (and specifically Berlín) is another of the great centers of entrepreneurship in Europe. The main operation that took place in the country in 2013 was the sale of JouleX to the American firm Cisco for more than $170 million.

Spain

1. TouristEye, Madrid startup for planning travel, was bought by another industry giant, Lonely Planet. Although the amount of the transaction was not made public, sources close to the company claimed that all parties came out winning with the sale.

2. Intel bought the Seville company Indisys for more than $26 million in September. The Spanish company had developed a natural language processing system used by many companies and brands in their customer care systems.

3. The tourism and online travel industry was one of the main protagonists of 2013. One of the most important operations, in addition to TouristEye, was the purchase of the search engine Niumba by TripAdvisor.

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