This time, he sold Axigen, a software solution that allows companies to create their own electronic messaging (e-mail) server, to a group of Romanian entrepreneurs, who own Modulo Consulting, a solutions integrator for communications operators.
“Over time we’ve been the first to implement some of the biggest Axigen projects. Not the most, but the biggest. We implemented Axigen in the United States, in Latvia, and even in Romania,” Bogdan Moldovan, one of the four owners of Modulo Consulting, who bought Radu Georgescu and his partner Diwaker Singh out of the Axigen Messaging SRL.
“We’ve had a long relationship with Radu Georgescu and the moment the opportunity presented itself for us to buy Axigen, we did it.”
The four Romanians who bought Axigen are Cristian Daniel Draghici (36), Bogdan Moldovan (36), Ion Nistor (35) and Vlad Trofin (35).
Axigen is the product the Gecad team of Romanian businessman Radu Georgescu started working on ten years ago, right after the sale of the RAV antivirus technology to Microsoft in 2003. The sale of Axigen is Radu Georgescu’s fourth exit from a company he built from scratch in Romania, after RAV, Gecad ePayment (Naspers) and Avangate (Francisco Partners).
Asked to provide more details about the deal, Moldovan told ZF he was not at liberty to do so because of the non-disclosure agreement with Georgescu, who is known to never discuss the details of his exits.
“It wasn’t for free,” Moldovan said, though.
Modulo Consulting, a company established in 2002, has a tech team of ten people, plus three more providing support and Axigen has a team of ten people, which the new owner will keep in full. Modulo Consulting posted about EUR640,000 revenue last year.
What level of development has Axigen reached so far?
The total number of mailboxes managed via the company’s solution is hard to track, but support is paid every year for one million e-mail accounts, Moldovan said, without saying how much that meant in terms of revenue.
The new owners plan to convert Axigen to a start-up business model, even though its products have millions of customers, so the team could develop innovative solutions.
Modulo Consulting is called for help when a telecom service provider does not find a ready-made product to address a specific business problem, Moldovan said.
Many projects the company has worked on over the years entailed implementation of e-mail servers, such as the discontinued Xnet service of Connex (now Vodafone i.e.), Moldovan said, adding he believes this expertise can help Modulo Consulting turn Axigen into precisely the product communications service providers need.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)