America’s NetApp is buying the start-up spot, KKCG will also sell its stake in it

Today, the Springtide Ventures fund, which belongs to Karel Komárek’s KKCG group, has sold its stake in SPOT. The buyer is NetApp, the leader in cloud data services.

An agreement was signed today allowing NetApp to enter into SPOT. The transaction was announced on the NASDAQ, America’s largest electronic stock exchange. Following the merger, the companies will become the world’s number one provider of Application Driven Infrastructure and, thanks to their state-of-the-art platform, will contribute to optimizing the costs for public cloud computing and running repositories.

Apart from the Springtide Ventures fund, other major investors, such as Highland Partners, Intel Capital and Vertex, are also selling their shares.

Springtide Ventures first invested in SPOT (formerly SpotInst) in August 2016. “Even then, we were impressed by their unique idea for optimizing cloud services,” said Michal Tománek, KKCG’s Chief Investment Officer. Over the course of five years the original start-up was built into a company that by 2019 had revenues of over $ 20 million and an annual volume of recurring revenues worth over $ 22 million.

“A great idea tailor-made for today’s technological trends, an idea that can save both hardware and financial capacity; there is enthusiasm and a team that is able to move it all in the right direction. This is the basis of SPOT’s success, today we are happy to hand over the share to NetApp,” said Tománek, adding that this is a prime example of a successful investment in a start-up.

“SPOT was founded with a vision to revolutionize the way companies consume cloud infrastructure services, using analytics and automation to deliver the most reliable, best performing and most cost-efficient infrastructure for every workload on every cloud,” said Amiram Shachar, Founder & CEO, SPOT. “We look forward to joining the NetApp family and building together the future of Application Driven Infrastructure and helping customers to deploy more workloads in the cloud.”

“In today’s public clouds, speed is the new scale. However, waste in the public clouds driven by idle resources and overprovisioned resources is a significant and a growing customer problem slowing down more public cloud adoption,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager, Public Cloud Services, NA. “The combination of NetApp’s #1 shared storage platform for block, file and object and SPOT's compute platform will deliver a leading solution for the continuous optimization of cost for all workloads, both cloud native and legacy. Optimized customers are happy customers and happy customers deploy more to the public clouds.”

KKCG is active in the American information technology market, and has been investing in it for many years, for example by means of the Jazz Fund. The Geewa gaming studio from the KKCG portfolio recently came under the spotlight of another American investor, AppLovin. AppLovin bought Geewa this spring. KKCG is a long-term investor in information technology and now this field has become one of the group’s basic pillars. Holding Aricoma currently covers companies such as AUTOCONT, Cleverlance, DataSpring and AEC.