I’ve known Ben White for a long while. In 2008 he and his brother Jos sold MessageLabs to Symantec for £400m and went on to establish Notion Capital. You can read our many posts of their activities since by searching the archives.
Today the FT reports that Notion Capital is close to raising $150m for a new fund to invest in cloud-based tech companies. 10% of this is coming from Ben and Jos’ own pockets. This is 3x the first Notion fund which, amongst other investments, took a stake in the White brothers’ other company – Star.
Given the great difficulty which other tech-based funds have had in raising funds in recent years, this is a great testimony to the reputation of the White brothers. My only concern is the a focus on ‘cloud’ is actually no focus at all as we see most of the tech sector moving to embrace cloud over the next period. The FT cites a Cisco report forecasting that 50% of all business workloads will be processed over the internet by 2014. And, of course, in the consumer arena, cloud is the de facto mode – even though most consumers don’t understand (and why should they?) that things like FaceBook and Instagram are cloud based services.