CHURCHDESK ORDAINED WITH $2M TO TAKE CHURCHES INTO DIGITAL AGE

Mangrove Capital Partners leads investment in church management platform

Church management platform ChurchDesk today announced $2m of financing led by early-stage venture firm Mangrove Capital Partners. The Copenhagen-based startup, which helps staff and volunteers run their church more efficiently and better engage with their local community, will be using the funding to expand its product and marketing team, accelerate roll-out of new product enhancements and drive expansion across Europe.

ChurchDesk is a cloud-based church management platform with an integrated set of tools that take care of ecclesiastical admin, increase transparency and improve information flow between staff, volunteers and the community. The tools include a shared intranet, digital calendar, file manager and messaging system for email and SMS, as well as a content management system (CMS) for effortless website and campaign management. Thanks to the ChurchDesk mobile app, available on iOS and Android, righteous work can be carried out while on the move.

Christian Steffensen founded the company in 2010, having seen how his mother struggled to run her church in Denmark. Steffensen now has over a thousand churches across Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom, with 10,000 staff users delivering over 50k events every month through the platform. It also counts Klaus Nyengaard, previously chief executive of Just Eat, as its chairman.

“The challenges that clergy face are two-fold - they have dwindling congregations because they lack CRM or marketing tools and they’re poorly managed,” comments Christian Steffensen, CEO at ChurchDesk. “My mother is 62, she’s been a pastor all her life and is a theologian. She’s hardly going to reinvent the way her industry operates but she does have an iPhone and an iPad.”

Mangrove Capital Partners, an early backer of Skype and Wix.com, led the investment. Klaus Nyengaard also joined the round having previously provided seed capital together with Accelerace, the Scandinavian accelerator.

“This really is an intriguing business. It’s already the dominant provider of church management systems and will shortly have an incredible network effect amongst both church workers and attendees,” comments Michael Jackson, partner at Mangrove Capital Partners. “The scope for growth here is phenomenal – it’s a $370bn market globally and has simply been overlooked.”

“The Church of England has twenty thousand churches and an enormous amount of money but it’s terrible at engaging its audience. Churches are organizing all kinds of events and activities but people are largely unaware,” continues Steffensen. “Having focused on creating a church management system, we’re now building it out so churchgoers can use it to connect with their pastors as well as other churchgoers.”

Internet Ventures invests in four promising companies

Internet Ventures, fund managed by the Private Equity Managers Group, whose shareholders are the National Capital Fund and MCI Management, has just invested a total of over PLN 15 million.

The capital went to four fast-growing companies: StarBroker.pl (real estate), SiDLY.pl and ZdroweGeny.pl (medicine) and mfind.pl (insurance comparison site).

The last months have been a very intensive time for our fund. Our four latest investment projects are innovative, rapidly-growing companies, which can soon become market leaders in Poland, as was the case with previous investments of Internet Ventures, and break into CEE region markets - said Tomasz Danis, who manages the Internet Ventures FIZ.

StarBroker is a cutting-edge commerce and communication platform, which helps real estate owners to find real estate agents, set the sales conditions and then evaluate the agent’s service during the transaction. For agents StarBroker streamlines the management of a real estate portfolio, for real estate owners it facilitates ongoing tracking of the let/sale process. All of this is free and available in the mobile version as well. StarBroker is a revolution in ad websites: a passive “poster pillar” is replaced with a dynamic owner-agent communication. The website was founded by David Rice and Michał Nowakowski, associated among others with Excelead S.A. and advertising agency Bueller & Frye. Both founders have considerable experience in the real estate sector. The target financing for the company is up to PLN 3 million.

The second investment is innovative SiDLY. Telemedicine, one of the most promising branches of medicine, is a product of cutting-edge IT technologies. That is why Internet Ventures decided to become in June 2015 a shareholder of SiDLY, a pioneer of innovation in its sector. The investment may amount to PLN 4 million. SiDLY builds innovative telemedicine equipment for patients requiring constant medical care, both institutional and individual patients. SiDLY Care is a device for constant monitoring of medical parameters. SiDLY Care functionality enables remote healthcare, improves the operation of modern healthcare institutions and provides assistance to users in everyday activities. The SiDLY product may indeed revolutionise Polish healthcare institutions.

Positive Costain results reflected in 15% dividend hike

·         Costain continues to win series of new contracts

·         Revenues and operating profits up 17%

As Costain reports its half year results this morning, Helal Miah, investment research analyst at The Share Centre, explains what they mean for investors.

“Costain, the engineering and infrastructure projects group, has this morning reported an encouraging set of half year results. These included a rise in revenues to £621.1m and operating profits of £13.1m – both up by 17%. These improved figures were supported by a good number of long term contracts awards, including the development of the M4 corridor around Newport and the underground link between Crossrail and the Bakerloo Line at Paddington Station. Keen investors should note that these contracts reflect strong growth within UK infrastructure projects and major customers continue to invest in upgrading and renewing the UK’s transportation networks. The group’s order book has jumped by 16% to a new record level of £3.7bn.

“Management remains confident for the remainder of the year, saying that full year numbers will be at the upper end of the board’s expectations.  This confidence is reflected in the 15% hike of the interim dividend to 3.75p. The market has welcomed these figures and the shares are up nearly 4% this morning. With features such as these in mind, we continue with our ‘buy’ recommendation for investors looking for a balanced return willing to accept a medium level of risk.”