Shuttleworth Group company HBD Venture Capital has exited its investment in mobile software start-up Red Five Labs. It has sold its 23% stake in the company to Anglo Dutch Holdings, better known as the Fed Group.
HBD, which invested R1,7m into a company that had a vision and a business plan - but no employees, no product and no track record - has made a tidy return, having sold its stake for R3,5m.
Red Five Labs' technology enables applications written for one type of phone to run on another. The majority of software developers use the.Net programming languages, but most smartphones are based on Symbian and don't support.Net (in the same way that applications written for Apple Mac don't work on the PC).
Red Five Labs' technology changes this by removing the need for applications - whether these are games or screensavers - to be rewritten for each type of smartphone.
The company has completed its first phase of development and needs another round of financing to take it to market.
The Fed Group was looking to diversify its portfolio and had the appetite for a start-up investment.
