As investors and operators of enterprises, the Arowana team is all too familiar with how mission-critical technology is to businesses and consumers alike. A few high-growth companies are standout technologies in their space, and we are looking forward to supporting them on their next stage of growth.

Alicorn Global Ventures, our global venture capital firm, completed a busy first quarter of CY2021 with two secondary investments in fast-growing technology companies totalling US$13.5m. Both investments are proprietary opportunities that remain confidential at the time of writing.

Alicorn recently invested $3.5 million in a global DevOps software company with a continuous delivery and collaboration platform for cloud-native applications and microservices. Its modern CI/CD platform is designed for software development teams building and deploying cloud-native applications using containers, serverless, and Kubernetes.

Alexander Assim, Principal at Alicorn said: “DevOps is at the centre of two critical trends in enterprises over the last decade: a mass transition to cloud-native systems, and a new mission criticality to the performance of business software and IT infrastructure. Today, the average enterprise has approximately 500 custom applications and will develop and deploy approximately 40 new applications in a year. That challenge is being solved through CI/CD and DevOps automation.”

In addition, Alicorn has also completed a $10m co-investment in a mobile commerce monetisation company. The company’s AI/ML-powered technology enables frictionless commerce for users by presenting superior discovery recommendations, at the edge, thereby protecting user data from leaving the device. The platform infers what products and services the user might be interested in and generates recommendations in a seamless manner that complements existing user interaction. The company’s technology is distributed to millions of Android users worldwide through telecoms carriers, member organisations, and other entities. It recently received iOS-certification, further increasing its already significant addressable market.

“The company has achieved substantial growth through technology that improves the commerce experience of mobile device users without ever opening an application. We’re excited to be investing at such an inflection point for the team, before the release of their next product generation, and with it an exit from stealth,” notes Alexander Assim.

We are pleased to have led both investments in companies that already count the likes of Microsoft, Red Dot Capital Partners, and JRJ amongst their investors. We look forward to the journey ahead with our co-investors at Arowana and further investments from the wealth of opportunities we continue to see in the market.