Sussex Place Ventures leads investment in Skimbit

I have recently completed my first investment at Sussex Place Ventures, the  resident fund manager at the London Business School where I joined the team as an Operating Partner 3 years ago in order to raise a new fund.

The investment (led by SPV with participation from NESTA and The Accelerator Group) is in an exciting affiliate marketing start-up Skimbit whose main product is SkimLinks – a ‘software as a service’ offering which simplifies affiliate marketing and makes this attractive revenue model (where you get paid for referring traffic to ecommerce merchants) accesible to content publishers, forums and blogs of all sizes. Instead of having to sign up with 16+ affiliate networks, hand-edit links to merchants in multiple different formats etc you just sign up with SkimLinks; incorporate a single line of code in your web source and wait to receive your first cheque. In a world which is increasingly sceptical about the value of PPC/CPM campaigns, a product which makes the most virtuous form of CostPerAction (CPA) model as simple to use and accesible as AdSense is timely.

Skimbit is led by tenacious Australian entrepreneur Alicia Navarro who kept her company and vision alive by sheer force of will through a long search for the right business model and then for financing. Typical of the way we work at SPV we spent almost 10 months getting to know Alicia and her team before leading her first investment round and we helped  her develop her vision and execution well before we were ready to invest. Early stage investments of this type are rare indeed in the current economic climate and a testament to the confidence we have in the robustness of the SkimLinks proposition. TechCrunch covered the round here.