A London company set up for the purpose of acquiring companies in the information technology sector has snapped up its first prey. Inventure Ltd has acquired Astrogamma Ltd, a private company, incorporated in New York with one shareholder, for #7m. Inventure was appointed to manage the company last June, a sort of buy-in to a buy-out as Inventure director Michael Adama put it. The funds came from 3i Group Plc, Thompson Clive & Partners Ltd and the management team at Inventure. Thompson Clive and 3i have equal stakes, with the majority being held by the new management. Adam established Adam Harding & Lueck, a technology-based fund management company, which was sold to ED & F Man Group in 1994. Alongside him is Mark Simon, an IBM Corp veteran who was involved in the restructuring of the US software and services business, Brendan Foley and Richard Mead, late of Ernst & Young and Thompson Clive’s Colin Clive as a non-executive director. The main Astrogamma product is FENICS Pricing, a currency option pricing system with around half its sites in Europe, the rest in the Far East and US. Inventure claimed it has at least 90% of its market, including most of the major banks. The company is now working on connecting FENICS to back office systems, by linking FENICS Pricing and FENICS Analysis tools in a product called FENICS Connect, due for launch in May. The next acquisition may not be so simple, said Adam, given Inventure’s involvement with Astrogamma since June, but it will be concentrating on high- technology companies with a high intellectual content.
