It’s rare that two pieces of similar bits of investment news land on my desk on the same day.
First I learned from TechCrunch that Clearbooks (cloud-based accounting system for SMEs) has raised £300K from Dutch entrepreneur Tjeerd Kramer via WAKR Holdings BV which values Clearbooks at £6m apparently. Clearbooks claims ‘revenues in excess of £500K” and is currently ‘profitable’.
Then I learned that Duane Jackson had sold some of his shares in KashFlow
(cloud-based accounting system for SMEs) for just short of £1m to Nathan Kirsh – the 80 year old South African business/property magnate. Really good to see Duane getting some serious money at last. As readers probably know, the Prince’s Trust helped Duane to start KashFlow. Indeed last week the Prince’s Trust announced a special deal for other Trust businesses to use KashFlow which will, in turn, raise money for the Trust. Win-Win!
On top of that Duane tells me he has at long last hired a top-notch CEO and other additions to the management team. More soon when it is formally announced.
Both companies openly declare Sage to be their main competitor. I remember a couple of years back a very distraught lady from Sage’s PR/AR Dept phoning me to ask ‘what can we do about KashFlow?” which was being particularly irritating to them at the time. My answer was simple “Buy them!” Even if they had done nothing with them, the couple of million it would have cost them then would still have been a good buy. It will take appreciably more than that to ‘take them out’ now…