Calcus.com, described as the leading native advertising platform in Finland, is crowdfunding on Invesdor. brings native advertising to SMEs. Calcus reached a €3 million turnover and 17% EBITDA in 2016. The company seeks to boost growth with mergers and acquisitions, for which it is currently raising up to €2 million funding on Invesdor. Pre-money valuation is pegged at €5 million. The company expects to drive €10 million in revenue in 2018. Calcus also stated it will be exploring opportunities for an IPO in the future – perhaps as soon as Q4 2018. Calcus also intends on doing strategic acquisitions.
“Marketers need to make a shift from ‘telling and selling’ to ‘native sharing’,” says Ville Maila, member of the board of Calcus. “Native advertising means publishing content, whether textual or video, within the media so that it blends into the editorial content of the media without being distracting. This new form of marketing is now increasingly starting to be used by small andmedium-sized enterprises. Over the recent years, more and more of the bulk of the SME iceberg has started to take its steps into the world of digital marketing with services such as Google’s Adwords. In a very short time, SMEs have become more open to these kinds of marketing investments.”
Calcus believes its edge over its competitors lies in its ability to serve small and medium-sized enterprises operating in business-to-business markets. The company shifted strategy in 2014 moving away from traditional content marketing to native advertising – a pivot that has appeared to work.
“Big marketing agencies target big advertisers, they don’t care about SMEs. We have tailored our offering specifically to SMEs,” Maila says. “With this strategy, we have become the leader in native advertising in Finland.”
Maila sees a lot of growth in their market as they gear up for an initial public offering. The B2B SME market is estimated at €80 million and Calcus wants to capture much of that market.
”Old methods are not working. For example, the biggest B2B SME service provider in the field has €28 million in revenue and making a loss of €3M,” says Maila. “Every company has a life cycle and in Calcus we are now seeing the moment of exponential growth.”
Currently, the SME sector consists of roughly 60% of Calcus’ revenues, 20% from large companies and the rest from NGO’s and Government organizations.
“After the company’s pivot to native advertising in 2014, its growth looks promising and I think investors will find worth a good look.”says Mikko Savolainen, communications manager at Invesdor.
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