Investment fund Catalyst buys a third of Romanian platform avocatnet.ro, with 1 million monthly readers

Private equity and venture capital fund Catalyst România recently bought a 30 percent share package of the website avocatnet.ro, which provides information and juridical and business consultancy to small and medium Romanian companies. This is the first transaction made by the investment fund www.avocatnet.ro was set up in 2001 as a community and resource for juridical information, and then it became a platform with its own content, as well as content generated by users. In March 2013, the platform had traffic of 1 million unique visitors. The deal was structured as a share capital increase, and the entire funding brought by Catalyst – whose value was not disclosed – will be used for further growth of the portal. A first development stage will consist of launching www.superlege.ro, an online service for laws and juridical information that offers users updates and fast searches among the legislative database, according to Alin Popescu, managing partner of avocatnet.ro. With a capital between EUR 20 and 30 million, Catalyst Romania will finance with EUR 200,000 to EUR 2 million Romanian small and medium enterprises from the areas of media and telecom. The biggest contributor to the Catalyst capital is the European Investment Fund EIF, via the JEREMIE - Joint European Resources for Micro to Medium Enterprises program. Other investors in the fund are BT Asset Management and 3TS Capital Partners, which also manages the fund. editor@romania-insider.com