Innova Capital announced it has successfully acquired minority stakes in CloudFerro, a leading provider of cloud services to the European space sector. This marks another transaction under its seventh fund.
Innova aims to support the company in bolstering its organizational structure and leveraging prior experience in international expansion and future acquisitions. With this deal, the fund is expanding its presence in the European high-tech sector.
Launched 2015 in Warsaw, Poland, CloudFerro provides next-generation cloud computing services dedicated to specific industries like the European space sector, climate research, and science. And the company has a team of over 200 employees and owns cloud infrastructure in data centers across Europe.
CloudFerro plays a major role in developing key European initiatives in the satellite Earth Observation (EO) sector. These comprise, among others, building and operating one of the world’s largest EO data repositories – Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, a reference data source for the European Copernicus satellite constellation. Destination Earth Data Lake aims to ensure data access and big data processing in the cloud to build highly accurate digital replicas of Earth.
The company also successfully developed and operates the CREODIAS.eu platform that enables immediate access to Copernicus EO data, its processing in the cloud, and other related services. And over the last three years, CloudFerro has nearly quadrupled the scale of operations in Europe, thus becoming a regional leader in its market field.
The company’s ongoing cooperation with renowned institutions like the European Space Agency, EUMETSAT, ECMWF, the German AeroSpace Agency (DLR), the Polish Space Agency (POLSA), and Mercator Ocean is the proof of the highest-quality of specialized services offered.
The major factor ensuring the dynamic growth of the market in which CloudFerro operates is a significant increase in the applications of Earth Observation data used for climate change tracking, marine environmental monitoring, spatial and urban planning, forest and agricultural management, and many more. And the sector also benefits from the rapid development of modern satellite technologies.
With extensive experience and building on market trends, Innova-backed CloudFerro is planning to focus on the expansion of product & services offering and building top-notch competencies in the area of AI, thus opening up new growth and innovation prospects.
KEY QUOTES:
“With an acquisition of a significant minority stake in CloudFerro, we have entered a very attractive market, expected to enjoy a strong growth (+20% per annum) over the next few years driven by supportive mega-trends. We believe that Innova’s expertise and close cooperation with the company will prove beneficial in enhancing its position in the European space market and opening up new acquisition opportunities. These can help CloudFerro to expand its offering by adding complementary solutions and competencies within Earth Observation, but also enable a faster entry into new verticals, such as healthcare or science, where experience in processing large image data sets is highly valuable.”
- Krzysztof Kulig, Senior Partner who supervised the transaction on Innova Capital behalf
“We believe that our co-operation with Innova Capital is opening a new chapter in CloudFerro’s growth and the European expansion. We hope to leverage our – CloudFerro’s – competencies and resources together with our new partner’s resources and capacity to become a European champion of open source big data cloud computing. We want to strengthen even further our position in the satellite Earth Observation market and to make us a partner of choice in the area. Simultaneously we are going to research and develop opportunities in other big data related fields. All in all, we want to see Innova’s investment as a marriage of the leaders in their fields.”
- Dr. Maciej Krzyżanowski, the CEO of CloudFerro
