[French/Paywall] 4 candidates in France to buy Shadow, including one offer from a group of employees

FULL ARTICLE IN ENGLISH PART 1:

This Friday, four companies proposed to the Paris Commercial Court to take over Blade and its PC service in the Shadow cloud. While all agree on similar findings concerning the startup's situation, their proposals differ greatly.

In early March, Blade formalized his placement in receivership. The employees were then informed of the situation of the company, then the customers. The team then spoke publicly to clarify that nothing was changing in the short term, confirming that the envisaged track was that of a buyer.

Blade (Shadow) is in a difficult financial situation, awaiting a buyer Blade (Shadow) explains his receivership Shadow, a French-style cloud PC solution and a former hope for the Next 40 from FrenchTech, was therefore for sale. After the appointment of the receiver, the deadline for submitting tenders was set for Friday, March 19. We had already mentioned the candidacy of Octave Klaba . But four potential buyers finally came forward, including the current CTO Jean Baptiste Kempf , accompanied by four Blade employees.

The Commercial Court must make a decision by next month, each buyer having had access to the file filed by its competitors. They can then decide to improve it " at the latest two working days before the date of the hearing for the examination of the takeover bids by the court ". Deadline: April 8.

They will not fail to do so, some only offering a preliminary file " to see the game of the opponent " as indicated to us a few days ago a regular of these procedures.

Hubic wants to integrate Shadow into its European service offering This step allowed us to obtain a first detail on Octave Klaba's offer, which is important: when we learned that he was applying for the takeover of Blade, we did not know that it was not directly via its Jezby Ventures fund , but the company HubiC, created in November 2020. A name that was not chosen at random.

It refers to the storage service of OVHcloud acquired by Klaba, the operation having been carried out at the beginning of the year. As we mentioned this summer, the entrepreneur wants to transform it into a more complete solution, based on the Nextcloud and OpenIO duo. He has since clarified that he wants to make it a " European alternative to Office 365 / GSuite ".

Octave Klaba wants to relaunch hubiC with Nextcloud and OpenIO ... outside of OVHcloud It is therefore this new company that will carry this bouquet of services, which Shadow could join. At its head is Octave Klaba's brother, Miroslaw , who is its president. He is also financially involved in the case as we will see below. He is accompanied by Eric Sèle who runs the company.

His team told us that “ the takeover project plans to retain more than 85% of the workforce in France and the US, and to guarantee service continuity. The offer is funded to the tune of 30 million euros ”, with the aim of“ influencing the strategy in favor of a lasting corporate vision, centered around its customers, its products and its teams ”. This requires a diversification of the offer, as one would expect.

" Blade's globally recognized expertise in cloud gaming will be used to strengthen commercial offers for high-performance workstations for businesses and also cloud gaming offers for games via K8S ". The players should therefore not be sidelined.

Nothing is announced on the price side. Eric Sèle adds, however, that “ several months of work have made it possible to build a structured proposal. The success of such a recovery depends on the support of the teams to put their know-how and their energy at the service of this adventure. It is a new digital page that we propose to write together ”. To find out more, we had to turn to the file filed with the Commercial Court. And as with those of the competitors, we found a lot of interesting details there.

Shadow, his waiting list and his expenses too high Let's start with some numbers that we haven't been able to get on Blade and Shadow yet. Of the company's 97,000 customers as of December 2020, 40,000 were located in the United States. 34,000 users are on the waiting list, a shortfall estimated at 488,000 euros per month according to the HubiC team.

The company started with 318 customers in January 2017, peaking at 4,214 when sales opened in November of the same year. A year later, it had 42,540 subscribers. 2019 was a period of stagnation at around 62,000 to 68,000 customers, with the team running out of capacity on the server side. It was with the launch of the new offer that growth was relaunched in November 2019. In March 2020, there were 99,342 subscribers.

Prior to the turnaround, its 13 largest shareholders were:

Nick Suppipat: 42.81% Asher Kagan Criou : 8,25 % Emmanuel Freund: 5.74% Stephane Heliot : 5,74 % Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet: 3.53% Lionel Scotto: 3.46% Daniel Weil: 3.23% Thierry Jouseau: 3.04% Michael Benabou : 2,80 % Dominique Romano : 2,80 % Olivier Courlet de Vregille: 2.68% Charter Communications : 1,45 % LG Electronics Inc. : 1,31 % At the end of 2020, the company's financial debt stood at 29.2 million euros. Data center rents alone accounted for 13.9 million euros of the 25 million euros spent on infrastructure over the year. Costs deemed too high by the HubiC team, and a finding shared by other potential buyers.

But other elements are pointed out, such as exchange losses (3.2 million euros) or the interest on the leasing contracted with 2CRSi: 1.9 million euros. For this, HubiC has a ready-made solution: to rely ( again ) on the infrastructures of the other company in the Klaba family: OVHcloud.

/r/ShadowPC Thread Link - nextinpact.com