LONDON – Skills Matter, Europe’s largest provider of open source and agile training and events, today announced a $5 million investment from Beringea, the growth capital investor that manages the Proven Venture Capital Trusts.
Launched in 2003, Skills Matter helps their 35,000 strong developer community learn and share skills to write better software. The new funding will be used to provide even more opportunities for its community to collaborate with the world’s top technology experts through expert talks, meet-ups, training courses and hackathons. In addition, they will now be able to offer work and collaboration space. Recent support from companies like BlackBerry, SpringSource, Novoda and others will enable Skills Matter to open dedicated technology labs in its space.
Wendy Devolder, CEO and founder of Skills Matter, said: “Beringea’s $5 million investment will help us achieve our mission to firmly establish the UK as the #1 place to learn and contribute to software innovation. In 2013, we’re running over 2,000 advanced technology events, bringing leading thinkers and technology experts from across the globe, to the UK to share their ideas and inventions.
“We are expecting to announce some more sponsors soon, who will invest in Tech City by working with us on some pretty cool initiatives to help London’s Software Community learn, collaborate and share skills.”
Trevor Hope, Chief Investment Officer, Beringea LLP, manager of the Proven VCTs, said: “I am very proud of our investment in Skills Matter. Advanced software skills are and will continue to be key to ensure that the UK is globally competitive. Skills Matter’s approach to sharing skills, training and collaboration is at the heart of software innovation and opportunity. Wendy is an outstanding CEO and her commitment to developing Skills Matter has allowed her to grow a highly engaged community and strong relationships with leading technologists and innovative software companies around the world. With our help we are hoping to further establish Skills Matter as the place to be for software innovation in Europe.”
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Notes to Editors:
About Skills Matter
A highly social tech company providing a 35,000 strong community with thousands of opportunities to learn and share skills in advanced, innovative technologies and practices for enterprise software development.
Since its foundation in 2003, it has been Skills Matter’s vision to provide “the go-to space for software professionals in Europe” – driving software innovation by bringing smart and creative people together in an environment that encourages conversation and collaboration, resulting in ideas. Nine years on, we run thousands of talks, meetups, conferences and hackathons, create valuable online content – our SkillsCast video’s, and produce a magazine – the open source journal, which is published quarterly.
Skills Matter also offers shared desk and small office facilities to those innovative software start-ups that want to be close to where the action is.
web: http://skillsmatter.com
twitter: @skillsmatter
About Beringea
Beringea is an international growth capital firm with offices in London and Michigan, U.S.A, which invests in high growth companies. Beringea’s London office manages a number of funds, including the ProVen VCTs.
web: www.beringea.com
About the ProVen VCTs
The ProVen VCTs (ProVen VCT, ProVen Growth & Income VCT, Proven Health VCT and ProVen Planned Exit VCT) are funds raised under the government’s Venture Capital Trust scheme for supporting UK SMEs. The original Ordinary share issues of ProVen VCT and ProVen Growth & Income VCT have generated higher Total Returns to investors than any other VCT share issues in their respective launch years, according to www.taxefficientreview.com.