I’ve chronicled the slide of BuildOnline in a number of blog posts over the past four years (notably Investing in a dot.com/SaaS business: a history), and the losses suffered by the early BO investors have clearly been shared by numerous other Ireland-based start-ups, as this Irish Independent article makes clear. Writer Roisin Burke suggests BO’s early backers lost €40 million (that’s just under £35m at today’s rates, or US$57m):
“… many respected investors lost money. Goldman Sachs and Irish venture capital firm Delta Partners, along with other high-profile names, lost a total of €40m invested in the late-Nineties when Brian Moran’s construction software firm buildonline merged with a US company in 2006 with almost €40m in losses.”
And this €40m excludes the losses incurred by investors in the other companies that were merged into BuildOnline, up to and including Citadon in 2006.
