Significant move in the regional venture capital market - PortfoLion's start-up investment Banzai Cloud Ltd. to be acquired by Cisco.

PortfoLion Capital Partners, a key venture capital firm focused on the CEE region, confirms news about Cisco’s intent to acquire substantially all of Banzai Cloud’s assets. Banzai Cloud is known for its pioneering achievements in the field of cloud-based container system management. Founded in Hungary, Banzai Cloud was funded in two rounds by PortfoLion, acting as the company’s lead investor, and now executing on one of the most significant exits of the regional technology market in recent history. The announcement by Cisco today of its intent to acquire Banzai Cloud’s assets is a re-enforcement of the health of the start-up ecosystem in the CEE region. We are proud to have been able to help Banzai’s exceptionally capable founders and team succeed and see this as a good example of building local companies into global success stories. We believe that the success of Banzai Cloud will also help level up the start-up ecosystem in the CEE region," said András Molnár, CEO of PortfoLion Capital Partners, part of OTP Group, lead investor of Banzai Cloud summing up the planned acquisition. Kubernetes, an open-source platform originally launched by Google enables IT experts to manage the simultaneous running of a large number of containerized server-side applications even among more than one cloud-based environments. The automated solutions offered by Banzai Cloud make the integration of Kubernetes significantly simpler and faster for large enterprises. This is one of the reasons why the individual applications have reached millions of downloads in the past years and the corporate Banzai Cloud blog has 60 thousand readers a month globally. Some of the key people behind Banzai Cloud worked together previously in the first half of the decade before founding and selling SequenceIQ, their first data management project, to Hortonworks (now Cloudera), one of the largest big data companies globally. Their next venture was Banzai Cloud, led by János MÁTYÁS, Miklós CSENDES and Krisztián FLAUTNER in which they set out to ride the wave of paradigm change in the market of application development and infrastructure management. Since founding the company 3 years ago it has received $5 million in two funding rounds including investments by PortfoLion Capital Partners. Two other participating investors included FastVentures and Euroventures; the latter was a founding investor in the company. “As a regional venture capital investor, we focus not only on finding talented teams with a global vision but also on partnering with them to help achieve a successful exit,” </em>András Molnár noted. Apart from its investment in Banzai Cloud, PortfoLion has recently completed investments in several other companies at varying stages of maturity - early, growth and late stage - that are focused on innovation and digital technology. The terms of the Cisco deal are not being disclosed.