Ciklum’s scope of activity and its advantages
The international outsourcing company Ciklum began working with a major investor, the technology platform Recognize Partners. The amount of investment is unknown, but Recognize plans to interact not only with the company’s management, but also with existing investors. One of the founders of the platform has become a board member.
Representatives of the companies hope that the cooperation will be beneficial for both parties. The investments will be used to improve Ciklum’s technology, as well as to focus on developments that will make an invaluable contribution to the global economy.
Recognize bought the IT company’s stake from investment fund AVentures Capital, which became a minority shareholder in 2019 after another round of financing.
The company was founded in 2002 in Ukraine by a Danish man and is headquartered in Britain. In 2009, Ciklum expanded through the acquisition of Mondo, 2 years later 50% of the company was bought from Denmark. At this time the business was actively expanding, an important moment was the conclusion of a partnership with Intel Software.
In 2015, the company was acquired by the investment fund of the famous American businessman George Soros. Such changes entailed a change of top management, as a result of which the founder of Ciklum, Torben Majgaard, stepped down as CEO.
In addition to providing outsourcing services around the world, the company is engaged in various educational initiatives. In 2012, an intercorporate IT University project was launched in Ukraine. Bionic University provides comprehensive training of specialists in various technological areas. The University offers more than 10 training programs, where those who wish can obtain practical knowledge on the development and promotion of a variety of IT products.
In 2014, Ciklum, in cooperation with various companies, created the Brain Basket Foundation, which aims to fund and conduct free training in programming. This project is designed to unlock Ukraine’s potential in IT. Ciklum invested 100 thousand dollars in such an initiative.
The business model used by Ciklum includes the employment of workers in both outsourcing and outstaffing. The company mainly focuses on IT-specialists from Ukraine, Belarus and Pakistan, who develop projects for the European and American markets. Ciklum provides services to more than 350 clients from 12 countries and works in such a way that developers and customers interact closely, constantly improving the functionality of the project. According to customers, the Ukrainian and Belarusian technology segments have enormous potential. For example, according to last year’s statistics, the revenue of Ukrainian IT-companies is increasing by 3-5 times a year on average, and this trend will continue over the next few years. The volume of exports of services in this area is more than 2 billion dollars a year.