THE intellectual property assets behind an app which was billed as the world’s first for contact sharing have been put up for sale.
John Wilmot and Craig Bartholomew, who founded Glasgow-based Nameloop in October, made the move after attempting to raise $7.5 million from Silicon Valley venture capitalists earlier this year.
The duo said then there was strong interest in the app from the business sector, including one major high street bank, having initially introduced the app for consumers to use for personal contacts.
Nameloop, which is based at the Entrepreneurial Spark hatchery in Glasgow, had employed two senior back end developers, an android developer and an iOS developer in the city, as well as a head of content and marketing in Brisbane, Australia.
Now only Mr Wilmot and Mr Bartholomew remain with the business.
Metis Partners, the IT consultancy and broker appointed to sell the intellectual property, has set a deadline of Thursday, December 10 for bids.
Head of brokerage Nat Baldwin said: “With the technology having been launched and proven, the company felt that now is the perfect time to seek a sale to parties in the space who can fully leverage the assets by tapping into their distribution channels or integrating the software into complementary social media technology.”
Mr Wilmot, who has previously built up and successfully exited two businesses, said the app had the potential to do for contact sharing what Facebook does for social lives and LinkedIn for professional networking.
Based on software developed in house, the app allows people to ensure their contacts are kept up to date with changes in personal details by automatically updating everyone in their loop. It does this by synching users’ local address books on their mobile devices.
Mr Wilmot told The Herald earlier this year that Nameloop had users in around 24 countries, and was enjoying growth of 30 per cent to 40 per cent per year.
However, although the software is believed to be proven, Mr Wilmot and Mr Bartholomew, the company’s two biggest shareholders, have decided that selling the intellectual property offers the best route to realising the app’s potential.
Mr Wilmot had flagged in February that the firm’s expansion plans would hinge on talks with financiers.
"We have an opportunity here to grow Nameloop to become the way people share contact information with each other, and with companies,” he said in an interview with The Herald.
"We're connecting the world at a contact information level, and ultimately a data level - the potential value generation created is huge and that has already started to attract some attention from top tier, Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms."
The Nameloop assets being marketed by Metis Partners include the platform/software source code and applications, goodwill and reputation of the Nameloop brand, trademarks, website content and domain names.
Mr Baldwin said: “Developed by a dedicated in-house team, the Nameloop API is remarkably robust, covering an extensive range of circa 300 methods, which would assist any further development of the platform to support additional mobile operating systems.
“We expect the sale to be of interest to companies active in mobile application and CRM software, e-commerce, telecommunication, banking, advertising and marketing, higher education and the HR/recruitment sectors.”
Glasgow-based Metis has previously sold IP assets for software companies such as WeeWorld, Blipfoto and Blinkbox.
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