$25m for ACT with sale of Meridio software firm

ACT Venture Capital will realise more than $25 million (€17.53 million) from the sale of Belfast software firm Meridio Holdings to Autonomy Corporation, a company founded by researchers at Cambridge University.

Meridio makes software for electronic document and records management.

ACT has been involved in the company since June 2001, when it was spun out of IT services firm Kainos.

ACT said yesterday that it will receive some $20 million initially from the Autonomy transaction and expects to realise an additional $5 million on foot of a 12-month earn-out provision.

"We are pleased with the successful exit of Meridio to Autonomy," said ACT founding director and Meridio board member Owen Murphy.

Meridio was "incubated" within Kainos, which has offices in Belfast and Dublin. The company, which has a turnover in the region of $20 million, makes software products used on the Microsoft Office system.

The firm has sales offices in the US, Britain and Australia. Its clients include Lloyds TSB, Statoil, TNT, Conoco Phillips, Pacific Life, Accenture, Deloitte, the British Ministry of Defence and it has contracts with several other public bodies in Europe, Australia and South Africa.

The company's products enable organisations to comply with corporate governance standards, including compliance with legislation and the avoidance of litigation.

"Meridio with Microsoft provide a complete lifecycle enterprise content management solution, from document creation and modification, to record declaration, policy-driven retention and final disposal," the firm said.

ACT, which was established in 1994, has completed more than 70 investments, mainly in technology-based companies. The venture capital fund has raised more than €350 million from US, European, Irish and British institutions.

The fund's strategy is to provide capital to high-potential companies in Ireland, Britain and Europe. Its typical investments are in the €1 million to €15 million range.

With a market valuation of some $3.6 billion, Autonomy provides software to automate operations on unstructured information.

In quarterly financial results published on Tuesday, Autonomy said its turnover rose to $89.57 million in the three months to September from $60.23 million in the same period last year.

Its pretax profit under IFRS accounting guidelines rose to $18.28 million from $13.2 million.

Autonomy says its technology forms a "conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, e-mail, voice or video".