House of Control AS: NOK 650 million private placement successfully completed – aims for listing on Oslo Stock Exchange

House of Control AS, a Viking Venture portfolio company, has announced the successful completion of a private placement with a total transaction of approx. NOK 650 million. The private placement attracted very strong interest from US, UK, European, Nordic and Norwegian quality institutional investors and was approximately 7 times oversubscribed excluding shares pre-allocated to cornerstone investors. House of Control secured backing from five cornerstone investors, Luxor Capital Group, Berenberg Bank, Consensus Asset Management, Handelsbanken Fonder and DNB Asset Management.

– We are very happy and proud of the successful private placement which is an important step towards a listing at Merkur Market Stock Exchange says Jostein Vik, Partner at lead investor Viking Venture.

House of Control was established by Lasse Sten (picture above by Nicolas Tourrenc) in 2006. Viking Venture acquired a majority stake in 2015 and is the lead investor with 56% of the shares before this transaction. Since 2016, House of Control has seen an annual organic growth of 30 per cent on sales of cloud-based software for CFOs with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. The solutions give the clients overview of legal and financial details and liabilities on contracts and assets. The company is now raising NOK 350 million for new acquisitions, while NOK 300 million represents a sale of shares by existing shareholders.

Founder and CEO, Lasse Sten, says both the company and the solutions are built on the vision to become the CFO’s best friend.

– The platform gives full control of contracts, assets and liabilities. Both the basic solution and the modules are developed in close collaboration with CFOs. When identifying needs and wishes across several companies, we develop new functionality which is easy to use and adds value in their work. The result is 1,200 customers across the Nordic region. We are now expanding beyond the Nordics, with an even better offering, says Sten.
Last fiscal year, the subscription revenues represented 94 per cent of the company’s total revenues, and by August this year, the total portfolio passed NOK 132 million.

– Our further organic growth is already fully financed. We are now raising NOK 350 million to finance future acquisitions. The goal is an ARR (annual recurring revenues) portfolio of NOK 500 million by 2025, solely driven by organic growth. Effects from acquisitions will come on top of this. We want to invite others to join our growth journey by the listing on Merkur Market, says Sten.

– The listing is a game changing milestone for House of Control and provides a great platform for further growth, says Erik Fjellvær Hagen, Managing Partner at Viking Venture and Chairman of House of Control. Viking Venture is continuing as lead investor after the listing.

First day of trading on Merkur Market is currently anticipated to be around October 20th, 2020.