Billions With Zero Knowledge - Austin Hill, Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

Congratulations to my brother Hamnett, father Hammie & the entire team at Radialpoint. Yesterday they publicly announced that they completed the acquisition of Toronto based Casero.

Here are some interesting facts from the press release,

• With the acquisition of Casero Radialpoint’s customer base includes 20 leading ISPs worldwide with direct access to more than 50 million subscribers. Radialpoint’s addressable subscriber base now includes one in every three broadband connected homes in North America and Western Europe.
• Radialpoint has grown rapidly over the past five years, from 75 to 250 employees, while experiencing an average annual revenue growth rate of 40 percent.
• This year the company is estimating 50 percent annual revenue growth over the previous fiscal year and expects to exceed the $100 million mark in annual revenue within the next two years.
• Radialpoint has been profitable and cash flow positive since 2004, and projects an estimated EBITDA growth rate of 40 percent this year.

It’s been awhile since I wrote about the incredible continued growth at Radialpoint, but if you haven’t been tracking the company here are some other recent events that have occurred,

• In September 2008 (actually a week or so before the economic crash) the company raised $98 million from the private equity firm TA Associates (our friend & Akoha investor John Meeks joined the Radialpoint board)
• In January 2009 Radialpoint acquired Boston based HiWired an award winning PC Support solution.

This is the latest in a series of transactions that Radialpoint has completed becoming one of the fastest growing & largest software companies in Canada.

This latest transaction is also interesting for the following reasons,

• Casero was founded, financed & run by Canadian serial entrepreneurs Kevin Kimsa & Paul Atkinson.  This is a great deal for them (congratulations to the entire Casero team).  I’m pleased to see Paul joining the board of Radialpoint and the company staying in the hands of a Canadian technology company instead of being sold to a foreign company.
• Kevin & Paul have had a number of startups in Canada and have also been angel investors & coaches for entrepreneurs at Universities such as Waterloo.
• Casero was funded in part by Canadian VCs including ArgoGlobal Capital a fund that Canadian serial entrepreneur, angel investor & venture fund operator Charles Sirois helped establish.

This is one of the best examples of our serial entrepreneurs (from multiple generations of tech & Internet successess in Canada), VCs and fast growing Canadian companies working together to create large Canadian based market leaders.

There have been a lot of discussions on the Canadian startup blogs recently about promoting Canadian success stories & the role of our serial entrepreneurs, angel invesetors and VCs working together to create an ecosystem of success.   (See Rick Segals recent run of great Canadian tech posts (1, 2, 3, 4); Chris Arsenault’s CVCA post on our industry being alive & kicking, Startup North’s great coverage of Incubators & Ignition and the debates about the problems with our VC industry and MontrealTechWatch’s recent coverage of the increases in Quebec provincial support of the VC industry and local startup incubators)

I continue to see incredible signs of success at every level of Canada’s technology ecosystem.  There are many problems with the global economy, the Canadian innovation sector - but as Radialpoint continues to show, there is a lot of exciting success stories occuring in our own backyard as well.

Radialpoint is just one example - but it happens to be one I’m very familiar with and couldn’t be prouder to be associated with.

On Wed 22 Apr 2009.