Popov, Arnaudov & Partners advised Sirma Group Holding for the sale of majority stake in Sirma AI, trading as Ontotext.

In September, with the assistance of the Law Office, a transaction was completed for the sale of 76% of the capital of Sirma A.I., operating under the Ontotext brand, and attracting additional investment in the Company. The buyer is a consortium of investors consolidated by London-based investment firm Integral Venture Partners. The institutional investors in IVP are the EIF, EBRD and IFC.  The total value of the transaction was approximately €30 million, of which over €19.5 million came as share price in the Sirma Group ecosystem.

On the 16th of September was registered the increase of the capital of Sirma A.I. by 10.75 million euro, by issuing new shares in favour of the investor.  This was the last step of the transaction on which  PAP has been working for almost a year.

Started in 2001 as a research lab within Sirma Group, Ontotext has become a global leader in enterprise knowledge graph technology and semantic database engines.  Today Ontotext is one of the most innovative and successful Bulgarian companies, and Bulgaria’s most successful participant in EU-funded IT research projects related to AI.

A company with a 30 year history, Sirma Group Holding has been a public company since its successful initial public offering in 2015. Sirma focuses on creating technologies that support the transformation of organizations to “smart organizations”. The group offers technologies and know-how on how to create business software for all stages of this transition – from data collection, to building models and knowledge repositories, to developing analytical and predictive models based on artificial intelligence, to delivering next-generation “human” interfaces to internal and external users.