The collaborative platform Elium, which enables knowledge-based organisations to digitize their knowledge sharing among employees, has raised 4 million euros during their series A funding round from Serena Capital and S.R.I.W.. The company aims to become the leader in the new “Knowledge Sharing Platforms” market, which is a new category of Enterprise Social Networks.
Foundation
Elium was initially founded by CEO Antoine Perdaens and three other co-founders in 2008. The company, which was formerly known as “Knowledge Plaza”, now holds a stable market position thanks to numerous international projects. Some examples are Capgemini Consulting, Lafarge, Holcim, MSL Group and the International Committee of the Red Cross. These international companies make Elium stand out, demonstrating that their product can also prove to be very impactful on large corporate networks. The company has also succeeded in creating an own collaborative platform market centred on knowledge sharing. Some of their bigger competitors are Microsoft Sharepoint, IBM Connections and Jive Software.
Rapid growth
This new financing round enables Elium to grow even further, aiming to have 40 employees by the end of 2018. This is twice the amount of employees who are active at Elium right now. From 2012 onward, Elium offered customers a 100% SaaS subscription. Initially, the service was used by a couple of large French actors to re-use existing knowledge and capture new knowledge. Companies that use Elium see the impact of information flows increase tenfold.
Other goals that Elium will now be able to achieve are to increase the platform connectors and to have a UX/AI/data applied research structure. Lastly, they will be able to accelerate the platform deployment in Europe. This will be done on three vertical markets: service companies, transforming industries and administrations. Elium is aware of how these markets are facing big economic and innovative changes in the near future. For this reason, the company provides them with the capacity to reduce physical and digital silos for accelerated change.
The investors
The foundations for a lasting partnership between Elium and investor Serena Capital seem to have been made early on. Perdaens stated the following: “Serena is a calm and responsive force. They have helped us to place even greater emphasis on our core markets, leverage our internal talents and give us key advice to increase our revenues.” Serena Capital partner Marc Fournier even stated that he is convinced that Elium will be one of the key actors in the world. Along with this new investor, S.R.I.W. continues to invest in Elium and states that their contribution will not only improve their regional economic development, but especially their international reach.
Huge potential
Both investors of this funding round seem to have faith in Elium’s potential, and I can definitely see why. The company has the chance to become the leader of a new market that has huge growing potential. While the market size was estimated to be 4.6 billion in 2016 by IDC, they expect this value to more than double in the next five years. This estimation was even deemed to be conservative, indicating the huge potential of the market. It is no surprise that investors would want to invest in the potential leading company in this particular market.
