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Conference Compass team | Image credit: Capital Mills

Netherlands-based Capital Mills, an equity and revenue-based financing firm that predominantly invests in Saas and e-commerce companies, announced on Tuesday that it has invested an undisclosed amount in two Dutch startups, Helin Data and Conference Compass.

Helin Data enables multinational companies such as Maersk and Total Energies with operational efficiency and safer remote operations through edge-to-cloud analytics.

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Conference Compass supports event organisers, conferences, and corporate event planners with a website and mobile app that helps increase engagement and interactions by making events a hybrid of offline and online.

About Capital Mills

Founded in 2015, Capital Mills provides revenue-based financing and (late) Seed venture capital to ambitious founders that want to scale their companies.

The firm typically invests between €500K to €1.5M and is funded by a network of over 50 investors. Most investors have an entrepreneurial background and hence provide valuable insights to their portfolio companies. An investment team of five supports businesses on a day-to-day and as-needed basis.

Capital Mills says, “Our mission is to help companies fund their growth with maximum capital efficiency. This might seem obvious, but in venture capital – this is a differentiating characteristic.”

An event engagement platform

Since the pandemic started, conferences have had to pivot their traditional in-person formats to online. With their event engagement platform, Conference Compass was at the forefront to enable this pivot.

Founded in 2010 by Jelmer van Ast, Conference Compass aims to revolutionise how conferences and societies experience content, delegates build connections and user experience convenience.

Using their event engagement platform, associations, professional conference organisers and corporate event planners can create branded event websites and mobile apps, on which speakers can record and live-stream their presentations, present their research in interactive round-table sessions, and schedule private video meetings with other attendees. All this, without the need to install any software and with all personal data securely stored.

In 2021, the company powered over 150 international conferences, gathering over 125,000 attendees, streaming over 600,000 hours of sessions, and recording over 35,000 hours of video for on-demand access. This has resulted in more than doubling their revenue in a single year. With the raised capital, Conference Compass says it will continue to innovate and make its technology available to even more customers.

Jelmer van Ast says, “The investment from Capital Mills will enable us to make our technology available to more event planners, helping to turn their audiences into active communities.”

René Delsing, Investment Manager at Capital Mills, says, “The technology of Conference Compass delivers great value to its customers in a dynamic environment. We are impressed by the growth and innovative technology of Conference Compass. Hence, we are proud to invest and support the team in their ambitions.”

Solving complex puzzles

Rijswijk, South Holland-based Helin claims to make remote operations safer and more efficient through edge-to-cloud analytics solutions. Its solutions decentralise advanced analytics right where the operation happens. The company combines machine learning, computer vision, semantic analysis, OSIsoft PI System, and edge-to-cloud infrastructures to provide customers with the ‘best’ possible insights to let remote operations excel.

By servicing global clients like Maersk and Total Energies with ‘expert’ solutions for remote operations, Helin claims to have accumulated experience in edge computing. The company utilised this to develop its edge analytics platform, Polaris, and transform it into a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) scale-up.

Polaris enables industry clients to improve the operational efficiency of ships, cranes, and solar farms by making the implementation of local artificial intelligence simple, fast and versatile.

Polaris answers the increasing demand for high-performance and scalable edge computation and monitoring. It combines local artificial intelligence with a centrally managed data and application infrastructure. The company claims that while expert development teams are often required to implement and manage such types of solutions, Polaris makes this simple, thereby limiting the overhead cost.

With the raised capital, Helin says it will further accelerate its sales and innovation. The company will focus on standardising the onboarding process, which will facilitate the managed services Helin is starting to provide on top of Polaris. The funds will also help the company to increase brand awareness, intensify sales capacity, and develop distinguishing security features. On the innovation side, Helin will enrich the security features of Polaris.

René Delsing says, “Helin’s deep knowledge and understanding of complex processes and technology together with global operating clients is impressive. Hence, as Capital Mills, we are proud to invest and support Helin in the transformation and acceleration of their SaaS offering.”