Danish IT company raises DKK 190 million: Aims for wild growth

After a capital injection of DKK 190 million, the Danish IT company Keepit will tenfold its value in five years and conquer the US Market.

The Danish IT company Keepit, which backs up cloud data, has landed an investment of DKK 190 million from the British venture capital fund One Peak.
“With the new investment, Keepit will be significantly more valuable in the future,” says the CEO, Frederik Schouboe: "We expect to grow by a factor of 10 over the next five years.”
Schouboe says that the current turnover is DKK 55 million.

“Keepit sees the greatest potential in the United States, but the company has had challenges breaking down the wall into the international market. With this investment of DKK 190 million, the hammer will be used,” says Schouboe: “The money is to be spent on sales, marketing, and some product development. We will need to get out and talk to the customers, and there we have to employ many new people who can go out and do it and make a lot of noise through marketing.”

Keepit was founded by Frederik Schouboe and Co-director Morten Felsvang in 2007. While in the past you secured your data by transferring it to local hard drives or USB connectors, today digital "clouds" and so-called "cloud services," such as Google Docs, have taken over the classic storage. Keepit offers an invisible service that protects the data that is stored digitally with e.g. Google or Microsoft.

An invisible service which, in connection with the capital raising, was valued at DKK 630 million.

In return for the investment, One Peak takes approx. 30 pct. of the ownership interest - a valuation that is difficult for Frederik Schouboe to relate to. “I think it's super cool to get such a high number, but it's paper money. I can't relate to numbers like that at all, it's too big.”

Scheduled investment

It has always been the plan that Keepit should find more money to grow further. In March 2019, the software company received DKK 10 million from the Danish Growth Fund, which, seen in the light of One Peaks investment of DKK 190 million, is small:

“We have gone out to look only for larger amounts, and therefore relatively few have had that capacity. We have been looking for a partner that we can work with for several years, instead of having to go out and raise new capital every year,” says Schouboe.

Actually, Keepit was ready to get an investment on board already at the beginning of the year, but the coronavirus pandemic sent the investment process onto thin ice:

“The field was then thinned out a bit. There were many of the big investment funds that pulled back their feelers because they had to figure out what was happening. But One Peak was ready,” says Schouboe.

The venture capital fund One Peak, headquartered in London, was founded in 2014 and has since made 13 investments in European IT companies. In its most recent investment round, the private equity fund raised DKK 3.3 billion. With the investment, Co-founder of One Peak David Klein joins the board of directors of Keepit.

Not to be sold

Frederik Schouboe, together with his business partner Morten Felsvang, became three-digit millionaires with the sale of Surftown in 2018 - another software company that the two developed. But the same fate is not to happen for Keepit:

The software maker pair:

• Morten Felsvang and Frederik Schouboe met in high school, where they discovered a common interest in technology.
• In 1996, they started Surftown, another software company that sold domains and web hosting to websites.
• Surftown was sold in 2018 for a triple-digit million amount.
• The founders reinvested the profits in Keepit and will now conquer new global markets.