How planning a financing strategy is a highly strategic matter as well as a financial one

Ovinto case study wins the Case Centre Award 2023 in the Entrepreneurship category

How will you finance the next growth phase of your scale-up? And exactly how much money will you need to raise? These are questions that keep many a growing entrepreneur awake at night. But designing a financing strategy is a very strategic decision as well as a financial one. What is a reasonable valuation, one that is acceptable to your current investors but does not deter potential new ones? And where can you find interested financiers who might also add strategic value to your scale-up?

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Frederick Ronse, founder and CEO of Ovinto, also struggled with these questions when he set out his options in 2018. The company, which is active in big data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) for rail freight transport, had just attracted several important customers. The cooperation with the international software company SAP was another crucial step forward. However, he needed more capital to enable further rapid growth at that time.

The following steps and decisions in this entrepreneurial adventure are the subject of the case study ‘Ovinto: Preparing for a series A venture capital investment round’, written by Sophie Manigart, Professor of Corporate Finance at Vlerick Business School in collaboration with the entrepreneur Frederick Ronse. This case study has now won the Case Centre Award 2023 in the Entrepreneurship category.

The Case Centre Awards have been presented every year since 1991 by the Case Centre. The Case Centre promotes the case method worldwide and shares knowledge and experience to inspire and transform management training all around the world. There are 10 categories, and the award always goes to the case that has experienced the strongest growth worldwide in the past year, in terms of the number of educational institutions that have bought and used the case. Besides putting outstanding cases in the spotlight, they also acknowledge the art of writing case studies and the added value that case teaching provides.

Case Centre Awards 2023 - Ovinto

As Sophie Manigart tells us: “Cases are a very interactive and dynamic learning method, in which participants work out different scenarios and possible solutions for a real-life business challenge with a tutor’s guidance. I have been using award-winning case studies in my own teaching for many years. The fact that I can now count myself among the winners makes me feel proud and humble at the same time. It gives me great satisfaction to realise that so many professors and tutors around the world are using the Ovinto case. It is the best motivation for me to search actively for other relevant topics and write more case studies.

She has already put that intention into practice, because she and Frederick are currently working on a follow-up case that probes deeper into how to make sure exiting a venture goes well. The fact that she can once again count on the entrepreneur in question’s full cooperation is of great benefit in writing the case as accurately as possible, with real-life insights from the protagonists in the story. The winning Ovinto case uses 100% realistic data from both the company and the venture capital market. This information is attractively packaged in various ways, including a video featuring the entrepreneur, and Excel files containing financial data.

Sophie Manigart continues: “An additional benefit of a close collaboration between an academic and a company is that you can invite the entrepreneur in question to your classes, which undoubtedly adds an enormous amount of value for the participants. It brings the story even more clearly to life. The participants have to present their valuation proposal to the entrepreneur, who gives feedback on their work and explains how things actually turned out in reality. Finally, what makes this case so strong is its familiarity. Students and participants know the stories of unicorns that often make it into the media, but the reality is that most companies never achieve that status. However, that does not make these companies any less important. That is why gaining insight into the challenges and problems they face is crucial to growing entrepreneurs.”

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