Just one year after coming out of beta, and six months since its UK launch, MiniMonos (it means Little Monkeys in Spanish) is taking off in the UK.  The company has raised sufficient capital to grow a team in England and focus on that market.  User numbers have grown to over 800,000, and revenue is now more than the cost of acquiring cutomers.

With an average month-on-month revenue growth of 30% over the last year, and members from over 150 countries, MiniMonos is clearly appealing to the target audience of 8-12-year-old boys and girls.

MiniMonos has raised over NZD$3.5m from NZ and European Angels over the last 2 years, after the company was seeded with money from the founder, Melissa Clark-Reynolds, and a Christchurch Angel investor.

Says Clark-Reynolds:

“We are now poised to open a UK office and grow even more quickly.  90% of our revenue now comes from the UK, with 10% from the US and Canada.  Launching pre-paid gift cards in Sainsbury’s in time for Christmas was a winner for us”.

Kids also get in-world rewards by completing real-world eco-projects through the MiniMonos EcoMonkey program. Through their projects, players have established recycling programmes in their schools, up-cycled old clothes to make toys, planted gardens, and cleaned rivers and lakes. 50 children took part in the pilot project in 2011.  Over 700 projects have now been approved.  National Geographic Kids Managzine in the UK picked up on the initiative and showcased it in their March magazine.

“These kids are learning to equate positive actions with positive feelings: fun, delight and accomplishment,”

“Our aim is to have a million children taking real-world eco-action as a result of playing on MiniMonos.”

With strong growth in sales, new investors and a European presence, MiniMonos’ goal is getting even closer.

“It feels like just a matter of time, now”.

MOVAC Fund 2 is an investor in MiniMonos.

The make-up of this additional investment is significant as it includes two US based expat kiwis who remain active in their respective industries, a number of local private investors active in the early stage eco-system and professional investment group Rangatira Limited.

Rangatira’s investment commitment is strategic and a material contribution to the Fund. Rangatira is an experienced Wellington based private investor with assets of over NZ$150 million. Established in 1937, Rangatira has pursued a policy of private equity investment in small to medium-sized New Zealand companies, complemented by holdings in a range of publicly listed New Zealand and Australian companies. The Rangatira board and management team bring significant complimentary skills to the MOVAC team.

We are continuing to raise money for Fund 3 and will complete a final close of the fund on the 31st of March 2012.  If you’d like to discuss investing please contact mark.vivian@movac.co.nz

FaceMe, an online video conferencing solution for businesses took out the award, but all 10 companies were outstanding. The NZ innovation sector is in great shape!

The interviews conducted with Greg Cross from PowerByProxi and Milessa Clark-Reynolds from MiniMonos can be seen below.  The full list of finalists can be found on the BNZ website.

St Thomas students with Movac Partner Mark Vivian

I recently had the pleasure of sharing a table with the winners of the Young Enterprise Trust (“YET”) High Growth Award along with MOVAC Partners Sharon Weaver and Mark Vivian.  MOVAC has been a proud sponsor of the programme for the past 5 years.  YET run an outstanding programme in secondary schools throughout New Zealand that exposes students to the possibility of creating and running a business.  Something that MOVAC and our investors are pretty passionate about.

Young Enterprise Trust is a charitable trust whose vision is to grow a more prosperous New Zealand through enterprise.  We see our purpose as a not for profit is to inspire, educate and transformstudents through enterprise experience.

Testing the Lion

This years winners of our award were from St Thomas of Canterbury College who founded a venture called A.C.E. – Advanced Clean Energies.  I was floored by the imagination, creativity and execution of this group of 16 and 17 year olds and what they’d managed to achieve in under 9 months.  Their inspiration came from the Christchurch earthquakes and a need to generate electricity when the power went down.  The product they created they call Lion.  Lion is a recharger that generates electricity from the heat differential between two plates.  Essentially it’s a pot lid that generates electricity from boiling water!  It generates enough to put a partial charge back on your cell phone.  Brilliant!

They have sold a number of these throughout New Zealand and have also commenced discussions to trial a modified version of the product with a village in Arusha, Tanzania, working through Edmund Rice School.  You can read more about ACE here:

• Emergency power generator
• Ace team wins young enterprise award
• NZ’s first young managing director of the year award

MOVAC is indebted to its Fund 2 investment group who have underwritten our sponsorship of YET over the last 4 years.

Fund 3 completed a first close at NZ$31m in July 2011 and is expected to complete a final close on 30 November 2011.  A close at this level is good news for MOVAC and its investors but even better news for New Zealand technology companies looking to source capital to expand their business activities.  Fund 3 will typically we invest between NZ$1m and NZ$5m or more when syndicating with our investment partners.

In assessing opportunities the key factors we look at are:

• Market proof – you have products in market and customers are paying for it.
• Scalable business model with dominant characteristics – your business can scale to tens of millions in revenue and there something about what you do that makes it difficult for others to compete against.
• Exceptional and experienced team – your team represents a balanced set of capabilities across sales and marketing, product development, financial management, strategy and leadership.  Supported by a demonstrable track-record.
• Capital requirements consistent with our and our partners ability to fund – we need to be confident that you can achieve your financial goals within the capital that we can source.  We’re not prepared to take significant follow-on funding risk.
• Return potential commensurate with risk – the returns you are projecting for investors are commensurate with the risk for the stage of business development that you’re currently at.
• You’re predominantly a New Zealand based company today, starting to sell internationally.

We don’t invest in property, retail or reseller businesses.  In general terms, the companies we invest in are underpinned by strong intellectual property that is unique to its target markets.  As an investment team we have significant experience in ICT, Life Sciences / Medical devices, Niche manufacturing / engineering and general IP commercialisation.

We occasionally post entires in our blog that go into more details on what we look for.  Please review these entries which can be found under the “Criteria” category.

My experience goes back to my early childhood, my Dad was Deputy Principal at Napier Boys’ High School where he set up the School’s first computer lab with AppleII computers.  He’d bring one of them home in the weekend and it was through this, at the age of about 10 that I started to be drawn to computing as a career.  Firstly playing games like…Pong, Brick out, Lemonade Stand…and then programming from about the age of 12 – started by copying out assembler code from computer mags for games like Frogger, Space Invaders (both of which I’ve just reinstalled on my iPad).

Steve Jobs had an undeniable passion for what he did.  Passion, to make a difference.  Such passion is well established as one of the key ingredients in the world’s most successful businesses.  It’s something we’ve come to actively look for in the people we back…have they got a little bit of Steve Jobs in them?

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Steve Jobs

My early exposure to Apple, the influence of the undeniably approachable Apple technology and Steve’s entrepreneurial example have shaped what I do today.

Thanks Steve, go in peace.

The annual awards honour members of the Microsoft Partner Network for delivering exemplary customer solutions during the past year, using Microsoft technology. Award winners and finalists were chosen from nominations from around the world, with nearly 3,500 entries submitted by partners from more than 200 countries. The award finalists and winners were selected from a group of nominations based on their dedicated use of Microsoft technologies to provide solutions for their customers’ needs.

“Our congratulations go out to GreenButton, Provoke and NV Interactive as finalists and winners of the 2011 Worldwide Partner Awards. They have delivered innovative, creative and superior Microsoft solutions and services, and stamped the Kiwi mark on the world as a hub for technology innovation,” says Paul Muckleston, Country Manager for Microsoft New Zealand.

“It’s incredible to see the level of expertise our partners exhibit as they pioneer solutions and services that exceed customer needs and expectations, and strengthen their businesses. We are proud to be able to work with such creative and dedicated companies.”

GreenButton has had extraordinary growth over the past two years, helping software vendors get to grips with the cloud and aiding their “transition to the cloud” journey. GreenButton’s hybrid approach allows software vendors to maximise their current software business while simultaneously enabling cloud functionality. Besides their patented software, the company’s greatest value is their experience, as they truly understand all aspects of taking an existing high performance application to the cloud.

“For us, this award is complete validation that what we do, and how we do it, is globally accepted and recognised. We are a fairly small team and we work long hours, doing the hard yards an internet start-­‐up company has to endure – compared with big US companies we’ve done it tougher with less, which is the Kiwi way,” says Vivian Morresey, Chief Marketing Officer for GreenButton.

“The recognition this award will bring us will definitely help our business grow and drive new sales – it is the kind of positivity all companies need! Having an internationally accepted award like this will allow us to position ourselves as real market innovators, instead of a ‘who, from where’.”

Adding to their double-­‐win at the Microsoft Partner Awards in 2010, Provoke, a Microsoft specialist that develops bespoke and product-­‐based software using Microsoft .NET, SQL Server and SharePoint 2010, has now won the coveted Country Partner of the Year Award for 2011. This award recognises Microsoft partners that have demonstrated business excellence in delivering Microsoft solutions to customers – driving customer satisfaction, innovation, winning new customers and business impact. Provoke is a fully New Zealand owned and operated company.

“As a design-­‐led software agency, we’ve worked really hard to build a reputation for delivering leading-­‐edge solutions on the Microsoft platform, with an obvious niche in SharePoint 2010. Equally as important as our technical wizardry is our unrelenting goal to deliver excellent customer service, which has underpinned our successful track-­‐record over the years,” says Mason Pratt, CEO of Provoke.

“The staff at Provoke have been hand-­‐picked from a talented pool of software developers and UX specialists from around the world and is the key ingredient to our on-­‐going success. We combine our skill base with a ‘whatever it takes’ attitude to get the job done, which adds significant value to our customers, providing them with world-­‐class solutions.”

“We are so very proud to have won this award, as it highlights our commitment to the industry and our customers, as well as our focus on driving continual improvement within our own business. It will hopefully give peace of mind to our current customers that they’ve backed the right horse and also encourage prospective customers to engage the best New Zealand has to offer. The recognition garnered from this win is a solid endorsement for all of our hard work.”

NV Interactive was also recognised as a finalist in the Web Development category for its use of technologies like Silverlight, Web Slices and Pivot Viewer to deliver compelling live web experiences for New Zealand cricket players and fans alike.

“The Worldwide Partner Awards represent our World Cup, and we’re thrilled to be recognised on the global stage for the wide range of innovative solutions we have delivered for New Zealand Cricket,” says Matt Pickering, Managing Director of NV Interactive.

“We will continue to innovate with the support of Microsoft, knowing we are delivering a world beating online experience for New Zealand Cricket fans around the world.”

Winners and finalists will be recognised at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011, the company’s premier annual event for industry partners, being held July 10-­‐14 in Los Angeles, California. A complete list of categories, winners and finalists, including category descriptions, is available at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/wpc.

“The alliance represents a unique opportunity for GreenButton” quotes Chairman of the GreenButton Board, Marcel van den Assum “and it again demonstrates that New Zealand does perform on the world stage”.

GreenButton’s patented technology, and collaborative business model, helps major software players enter the cloud faster than they would if they progressed on their own. Moving to the cloud is clearly on the roadmap of many software companies, yet they are struggling how to enter the cloud without cannibalizing existing revenues, or without major investment to rewrite their applications.

GreenButton’s plugin technology cleverly offloads compute and data intensive tasks from the application and distributes that to the Windows Azure cloud. Reinforcing this message, Forrester placed GreenButton on their “Top Ten picks for Cloud Prediction 2011”, quoting James Staten “…the ISVs lining up behind GreenButton are showing the way, and they’ll do it because it expands — not threatens — their market. “ GreenButton is well placed in a market predicted by Forrester to be worth $40.7 billion this year, with projection’s reaching as high at $241 billion in 2020.

GreenButton has earned its stripes in the Digital Media industry, have a number of GreenButton enabled applications being used by customers all over the world, and is currently in proof-of-concept phase with several leading software companies. With the support of Microsoft, GreenButton can now accelerate their expansion into other lucrative industries such as biotech, engineering, financial services and oil & gas, where the power of the cloud is highly desired.

“With GreenButton, companies have access to on-demand high performance computing resources without the burden of costly hardware and management costs,” said Doug Hauger, General Manager of Window Azure at Microsoft. “By leveraging the power of the Windows Azure platform, GreenButton is creating a unique solution that can be easily customized to grow with the needs of its customers across a multitude of verticals and workloads.”

The CEO and Founder of GreenButton, Scott Houston, is ecstatic with the alliance agreement “Securing this alliance with Microsoft allows us to execute the vision I have had for years, and the timing couldn’t be better”