Truffle in the news

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet
and Bernard-Louis RoquesTruffle Capital unveils the 5th edition of its Truffle 100 France ranking

On April 7th, Truffle Capital (in collaboration with CXP and Mar-Tech & Finance and with support from Syntec Informatique) published the 5th edition of its Truffle 100 France ranking of the country's top 100 software companies. 

At the launch, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (France's Secretary of State for Strategic Studies and the Development of the Digital Economy) talked about her view of the software sector with Bernard-Louis Roques, a Truffle Capital Founding Partner and its Managing Partner for IT investments.

The Truffle 100 France ranking and the interview with Ms Kosciusko-Morizet are both available on line.

Truffle Capital's annual lunch

During Truffle Capital's Annual Lunch (held on March 27th in Paris), Truffle Capital's four founding partners presented an overview of the fund's progress in 2008 and reiterated their investment strategy to investors and partners.

The event was also a great opportunity for some of the portfolio companies to talk about their experience related to investment by Truffle Capital. Speakers include Bruce De La Grange (CEO and Chairman, Vexim), Patrick Coulombier (Assistant Managing Director, Carmat), Eric Berthaud (Chairman of Watteco), Herbert Peels (CEO and Chairman of 2-B Energy), Philippe Houdoin (CEO and Chairman of Keyyo) and Luca Ascani (Chairman of GoAdv).

Spotlight on : GoAdv

GoAdv was recently named one of the fastest growing digital media companies in Europe 2008 by Media Momentum. For the fourth consecutive year, GoAdv, listed on the Paris-based Alternext market for innovative SMEs (NYSE Euronext: ALGOA), posts strong results, based on the dynamic performance of its two main brands, Better Deals and Excite. GoAdv is proving that the current economic downturn does not stop the most competitive companies to consolidate their positions.

Since its incorporation in 2004, the Italian start-up has experienced strong growth. GoAdv's 2008 turnover was €37.9 million, compared with €20.2 million in 2007 - an 88 % increase! Despite the general economic downturn in Q4 2008, the company continued to progress, with revenues of €10 million (+28%).

In addition, the group has strengthened its operational teams and management during the year, both in Europe and abroad. These investments have helped the development of new products and provide GoAdv with the resources to pursue its product and market development in 2009 and for years to come.

Luca Ascani
Founder and
chairman GoAdv

The financial performances of GoAdv are also very satisfying since the operating income for the fiscal 2008 reached € 5.1 million, up nearly 60% over the previous year, bringing the operating margin to 13.3%. Plus, net income before amortization of goodwill amounted to € 3.8 million, against € 2.7 million in 2007, an increase of 43%.

GoAdv has today a healthy balance sheet (the group's cash amounted to €12M) and, on April 24th, the company owns 12,5% of the share capital of Leguide.com, a French company operating an Internet-based price comparison service and which has been listed on Alternext Euronext Paris (ticker code: ALGUI) since 2006.

GoAdv (founded in Rome in 2004 by Luca Ascani and Salvatore Esposito) is now one of the European specialists in generating qualified web traffic. The company has designed and developed an 80-website network which in March 2008 attracted over 17.5 unique users. The company has an international focus and operates in eight countries: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom and Sweden.

GoAdv turned to Truffle Capital in 2007. Truffle then led a private placement of €6.53 million, in parallel with GoAdv's Alternext listing. In line with its reputation as a "business builder", Truffle Capital has worked hand in hand with GoAdv's management team to refine its strategy, obtain bank finance, organize secondary operations and analyze and perform acquisitions (such as Better Deals and the Excite Europe group of general-interest portals).

Portfolio News

• Information Technologies

Deny All extends its competitive advantage in the web application firewall market with the launch of rWeb 3.8.

Nicolas Gagnez
chairman Deny All
January 2009, Deny All (a pioneer in web application firewall (WAF) technology and the European leader in protecting and accelerating web, XML and FTP applications) announced the launch of rWeb 3.8, a true passport for obtaining compliance with the PCI data security standard.

This latest version of the rWeb WAF includes major new features: it optimizes white list and black list management, provides encryption functions, log integrity checks and transparent mode deployment and analyzes data sent by servers in order to prevent information leaks - a security threat feared by 40% of CIOs, according to a 2008 survey from Osterman Research.

With the release of rWeb 3.8, Deny All has introduced a new generation of WAFs which considerably increases application safety levels and enables PCI-DSS compliance, while simplifying administration and integration. This new product will further sharpen Deny All's competitive advantage in the French WAF market. Furthermore, the company has just joined the Truffle 100 ranking of France top software companies.

NetMediaEurope – European launch of the eWeekEurope website

In Q4 2008, NetMediaEurope (Europe's leading media/marketing firm for the IT professional and technology marketer audience, including the silicon.fr and VNUnet.com websites) announced the European launch of eWeekEurope, a portal which presents news and reviews of products and enterprise solutions for IT managers.

eWeekEurope
This announcement follows on from the license agreement signed in the spring of 2008 with Ziff Davis Enterprise, one of the United States' leaders in online IT publications. Ziff Davis Enterprise has around 350 employees worldwide and a global database of about 4 million IT professionals. Under the terms of the agreement, NetMediaEurope is now the exclusively licensed provider of eWeek.com websites in Germany, Spain, France and Italy. In the United States, eWeek.com is one of the leading information sites for IT professionals and purchasing decision-makers. The agreement means that NetMediaEurope has also become Ziff Davis Enterprise's pan-European partner for commercializing customer services for all its marketing programs (demand generation and online seminars & other events for IT decision-makers). Reciprocally, Ziff Davis Enterprise can offers its customers all the offerings developed on the NetMediaEurope's European websites, which are now able to directly market to the US.

The launch of the eWeekEurope website is part of a Europe-wide strategy initiated by NetMediaEurope in 2007. The goal is to continually enrich the company's portfolio of over 40 sites across Europe and partner with expert stakeholders in the IT market, such as Ziff Davis Enterprise. Judging by the NetMediaEuro's recent news, the strategy seems to be well on the way to success!



• Life Sciences

Neovacs – publication of an article in PNAS and the ranking of its TNFα‐kinoid drug candidate as the most promising drug moving into Phase II trials by Thomson Reuters

Guy-Charles
Fanneau
de La Horie
managing director,
NeovacsNeovacs, the biotech company pioneering the development of anti-cytokine and anti-viral regulation protein therapeutic vaccines for treating certain cancers and auto-immune diseases, has had an eventful March!

The company first announced the publication of an article in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA). Professor Daniel Zagury (the company's founder and now Chairman of its Scientific Advisory Board ) and colleagues reported that administration of an IFNα-derived immunogen (IFNα kinoid) delays and/or prevents the symptoms of lupus - including proteinuria, histological lesions and, above all, death - in a lethal lupus model in the mouse.

These experiments are very encouraging because they show that IFNα-kinoid immunization may represent a novel strategy for treating systemic lupus - a chronic, life-threatening auto-immune condition that affects over 3 million people
in the 7 main developed countries (source: Datamonitor, 2007).

Neovacs has also announced that its TNFα‐kinoid candidate (currently undergoing a Phase I/II clinical study in South Africa) had been rated as the most promising drug entering Phase II trials in a December 2008 survey by Thomson Pharma (a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters). The results of this survey thus strongly confirm the value of Neovacs' innovative TNFα-kinoid immunization approach for the treatment of Crohn’s disease.

Symetis will present at the 35th "Investment In Innovation Europe" (In3) seminar.

trans-apicale valve (symetis)

Symetis (a Swiss company aiming to develop and commercialize cardiovascular implants) will attend the 35th "Investment In Innovation Europe" (In3) conference, to be held on April 29th-30th, 2009, at the Marriott Rive Gauche hotel in Paris.

This conference is a global medical device event which turns the spotlight on the sector's rising stars and is an ideal place for forming collaborations, identifying investment prospects and networking with the most promising medtech companies.


Symetis develops cardiac valve replacements which are placed in the heart via micro-incisions. This revolutionary technology should help prolong the life of elderly patients and high-risk patients, for whom aortic valve replacement is the most frequent type of heart surgery.

The "Investment In Innovation (In3) Europe" conference is organized by Medtech Insight - a division of Windhover Conferences, a pioneer in the organization of world-class investment and development trade events for the medical, diagnostics, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. Over the last 8 years, over 1,600 presenters from emerging medtech companies and more than 8,000 delegates have participated in In3 events.



• Energy

Creation of Eco-Emerald Pte Limited - a joint venture between Eco-Carbone France (the majority shareholder) and Emerald Planet

Jatropha seeds
Eco-Carbone France, a company which offers consultancy and project development services in the climate change mitigation sector, has just founded Eco-Emerald Pte Limited in collaboration with the Australian renewable energy company Emerald Planet. This joint venture (which is 70% owned by Eco-Carbone) will be specialized in greenhouse gas emission reduction projects.

Eco-Emerald Pte Limited is developing community plantations of Jatropha (a plant used to produce biodiesel) in the Indonesian province of Papua. The objective is to plant 40,000 hectares over the next 5 years, with a production objective of 1.5 tons of Jatropha oil per hectare. In the long run, Eco-Emerald plans to cultivate 100,000 hectares Papua and achieve a total annual production capacity of 200,000 tons of crude Jatropha oil.

Thanks to technical support from Eco-Carbonne, the joint venture will seek to (i) optimize oil yields per hectare by providing farmers with high-yield varieties of Jatropha and (ii) improve cultivation practice by drawing on its expertise in crop management.

Eco-Carbonne was founded in 2003 by Pierre Landolt (the renowned Swiss businessman and banker) and received investment from Truffle Capital in March 2008. The company has two main climate change mitigation activities: Jatropha oil biodiesel production and consultancy on coalmine methane reduction, recovery and energy extraction. These projects generate significant quantities of carbon credits which can then be sold on international markets.

EDF Energies Nouvelles Réparties becomes a majority shareholder in Photon Power Technologies. 

Solar panels installed by Photon Technologies
In early March, EDF Energies Nouvelles Réparties (an EDF subsidiary specializing in the production of renewable energy at the point of use) increased its shareholding in Photon Power Technologies from 20 to 51% and thus became the company's majority shareholder.

Photon Power Technologies is a major player in photovoltaic solar energy. The company commercializes and installs photovoltaic solutions for electricity production by residential customers, companies and local authorities. Since its incorporation in 2006, Photon Power Technologies has installed no less than 67,000 m2 of solar panels. The company has offices in seven regions across France, employs 220 people and generated a turnover of €35 million in 2008 - €27 million more than in 2007!

This increased shareholding will enable EDF Energies Nouvelles Réparties and Photon Power Technologies to share their respective expertise and offer their customers even higher-performance systems.