Vodafone calls up ZYB

UK telecoms giant Vodafone has paid €31.5m for a Danish software company that specialises in making software for mobile phone address books.

The business, ZYB, is based in Copenhagen and was founded in 2005. In late 2006, Nordic Venture Partners invested in the company and over the course of the last 18 months invested a total of €5m.

ZYB works be allowing users to store their phone contact’s, calendar, SMS messages online, and the site also acts as a social networking tool

“We are proud of the achievements of ZYB, which has moved at impressive high speed since we made our initial investment. The Vodafone deal underlines that ZYB has matured by delivering a simple and sticky service to mobiles with great appeal to customers” says Henrik Albertsen, managing partner at the VC. “This once again demonstrates the potential of creating big successes in the Nordic region if the will to think big is present.”

ZYB is the second company that produces such software to be sold by VCs in the last eight months. In September 2007, Vox Mobili, a French company that provides essentially the same product as ZYB, was by a host of VCs including Iris Capital, XAnge and Innovacom. It was acquired by Indian telecoms company OnMobile..