I have often mentioned Meiosys in my talks on European Venture Capital as a model of European technology company that had developed a strong IP and product suite "over there" in Toulouse, France – financed by French and German capital, and then "flipped" to become a Delaware company, and hired a US CEO.
The exit is also "by the book" for a European company: the company has been acquired by IBM this morning for an undisclosed amount. Employees in the Palo Alto office will be moving to Menlo Park with their newly distributed IBM laptops, in a remarkably speedy integration.
Meiosys had raised a total of $16M from Partech, Siparex, Cisco Systems, Credit Lyonnais Private Equity , Alven, Baytech Venture Capital and Wellington Partners. The last round was a $7.5M series D that closed last September. They had developed a very interesting Linux clustering technology that enables the pooling and virtualization of servers, enabling increased resource optimization, application performance and fault tolerance.
The Register had the following quote from IBM:
"The state-of-the-art application-relocation capabilities and
fault-tolerant technology from Meiosys complement IBM’s current systems
software offerings," said Rod Adkins, a VP at IBM. "This acquisition
gives IBM the ability to provide even more innovative capabilities for
Unix and Linux, and will help advance our information on demand
strategy and virtualization capabilities for clients."
Philippe Collombel from Partech was on my VC panel at Innovate!Europe (which I have yet to blog), and hinted that they had an exit in the works (but would not tell me which). One of the remarks he shared with the audience was "Thank you Corporate America for providing us with exit opportunities". One more example – by the book.
Congratulations for a great exit to Marc Rougier, the Founder of the company, and to my friend Nicolas El Baze, who represented Partech on the BOD of the company.