Wave One :
More than $500 million in exits with less than $50 million investment.
Our focus during Wave One was very IT-centric – around storage, automation and cloud. During this wave from 2000 till 2015 some of our companies defined parts of the cloud landscape, and are still being used actively today.
Our team was involved in technologies like:
- OpenStack
- ZFS (the storage system)
- The first data dedupe system for backup in the world
- The first distributed storage system for large archive solutions
- The most used hypervisor in the world
2000 - Dedigate
Dedigate was one of the first advanced hosting providers for complex projects in Europe. They focused on large projects where uptime was highly important, managing thousands of servers on a global scale. Their automation platform was quite novel at that time and allowed them to keep the operational team small while providing the best service level agreements.
Exit: 2005
acquired by: Terremark (later Verizon)
2000 - Hostbasket
Hostbasket was the largest hosting service provider in the Benelux. Around 2005, Hostbasket had more than 35.000 small and mid-sized business customers and was a pioneer in virtual private servers and the first cloud.
Hostbasket developed a unique automation platform which allowed them to efficiently manage all their customers with an operational support team of fewer than 10 people. They were also the inventors of one of the first web builder platforms in the world which the customers could use to quickly create their own web presence.
Hostbasket also developed the cloud platform for Telenet, which is still widely used with many Belgium small and mid-sized companies.
Exit: 2008
acquired by: Telenet BVBA
2000 - VirtualBox
Still today Virtualbox is the most used hypervisor (virtual machine technology) in the world. At the time when Virtualbox was acquired, there were more than 1 million downloads a month.
Virtualbox was also the first hypervisor which could be used on all desktop platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX) and was 100% open source.
Virtualbox is the only company in wave one which we did not incubate. Incubaid helped Virtualbox with their strategy and to get acquired by SUN Microsystems.
Exited: 2008
acquired by: Sun Microsystems (later Oracle)
2002 - DataCenter Technologies
DataCenter Technologies was the first company in the world inventing a data deduplication storage product for backup purposes. DCT could backup thousands of servers much more cost-effectively and faster than any other technology solution at that point.
DataCenter Technologies was Incubaid’s first storage software company, making storage systems in datacenters more efficient and scalable.
Exit: 2005
acquired by: Veritas (later Symantec)
2006 - Q-layer
Q-layer was one of the first companies in the industry to create and end-to-end cloud automation product. Q-layer created and invented the virtual datacenter concept where complex IT resources were managed in what we called Virtual Datacenters at that time. Q-layer converged storage, virtualization, & networking in one stack.
Exit: 2009
acquired by: Sun Microsystems (later Oracle)
2009 - OpenVstorage
Kristof founded Open vStorage back in 2008. OVS worked closely together with Amplidata and later GIG.tech.
Open vStorage is an ultra-reliable distributed block store for hyper performance storage workloads and has customers actively using it across the world.
Open vStorage is now an independent cash flow positive company operating from Lochristi.
2009 - Dacentec
Dacentec was Incubaid’s datacenter facility in North America. The facility was the one of the first energy-neutral datacenters in the world, powered by renewable energy. Operating a 23,000 square foot purpose-built data center in Lenoir, North Carolina, it offered a comprehensive suite of dedicated hosting, co-location, and technology-neutral green cloud data center services.
Exit: 2013
acquired by: Centrilogic
2009 - Amplidata
Amplidata was one of the first highly-scalable object storage systems in the world. Amplidata could fit petabytes of data in one rack in a datacenter and could do this at a cost a fraction of others. The software is ultra reliable and was used by major companies in the world to store their large archives.
**Exit: 2015 **
acquired by: HGST (Western Digital)
2009 - Racktivity
Incubaid founded Racktivity with the goal to make datacenters eco-friendly and green.
Datacenters are globally massive consumers of electricity. Millions of servers are running without knowledge or insights in efficiency and power utilization. Racktivity has a portfolio of energy management systems for datacenter racks and individual servers, in which the uptime of the servers can also be remotely managed.
Exit: 2016
acquired by:
2011 - Rogerthat (Mobicage)
Mobile operators looking to provide more unified data services to their subscribers can benefit from the OneApp infrastructure to provide:
- mobile data cloud for storing personal information, pictures, videos, etc
- mobile communication platform for community formation or subscriber marketing
- mobile content cloud for premium content and delivery of content local to the subscriber
Exit: 2015
acquired by:
2011 - Awingu
Awingu develops a software to simplify enterprise mobility and liberate legacy applications. Our software aggregates all company files and applications to one secure online workspace that can be accessed from any device or OS using any HTML5-based browser.
2015 - Itsyou.online Itsyou.online is a web-based service using blockchain distributed ledger to keep track of online interaction in which you provide identity information. As a persona you can release only the necessary parts of identity information needed to complete an online transaction: e-commerce purchase, web registration, or contract signature.
Exit: 2016
acquired by:
2009 - Rivine
Rivine was an open source project to create custom Proof Of Stake blockchains. This approach makes Rivine more scaleable and more secure compared to the standard. Rivine later became the basis of the ThreeFold Chain.
Exit: 2016
acquired by:
2015 - GIG.tech
GIG delivers the first scalable and multi-tenant edge cloud solution that provides deployment automation and instant delivery of apps all over the world.
GIG was founded by Kristof as his first portfolio company, combining the strength of multiple Incubaid startups in 2015 and was at the foundation of an investment philosophy change. Not much later, Wave Two of investments followed.
GIG.tech is now an independent cash flow positive company operating from Lochristi.
Wave Two
Companies and projects Incubaid is currently invested in through funding, time, resources, and emotion.