Insider Brief
- Tensor Ventures led a USD 4 million seed round in London-based AppFactor alongside Begin Capital and Adara Ventures to support technology that monitors and modernizes large numbers of enterprise applications without disrupting end users.
- AppFactor targets a costly enterprise problem by enabling secure, in-operation modernization of legacy software, with deployments already underway at a major UK bank and a top-10 Fortune 500 company.
- The investment comes from Tensor Ventures’ second €50 million deep-tech fund, which focuses on early-stage technologies spanning software, AI, quantum, semiconductors, and techbio.
PRESS RELEASE — Czech deep-tech company Tensor Ventures, together with British venture capital firm Begin Capital and Spanish fund Adara Ventures, is investing USD 4 million (approximately CZK 84 million) in London-based startup AppFactor as part of a seed investment round.
AppFactor can monitor a large number of corporate applications and securely modernize them in operation, something that was not possible until now. For Tensor Ventures, which led the entire investment round, this is another investment from its recently closed second fund. The fund has EUR 50 million (approximately CZK 1.2 billion) at its disposal and invests in the most promising Czech and global technologies that are ahead of their time.
For large and medium-sized companies around the world, maintaining thousands of outdated enterprise applications is not only a demanding and tedious task, but also a considerable expense that consumes the capacity of armies of programmers and billions of dollars every year. Due to strict corporate security rules, ChatGPT and other similar tools are of no help in this case, which is why most companies in this area are just “putting out fires.”
“We know from experience that at the world’s largest companies, maintaining hundreds or thousands of applications can employ armies of programmers who do nothing else all year but manage outdated code,” says Ondřej Lipold, one of the partners at Tensor Ventures who was in charge of the investment, and continues: “This is the nightmare of every technical and financial director of companies around the world, which is why we see enormous potential in this area.”
And why did Tensor Ventures bet on AppFactor? “We have been in the advanced software field for two decades, but we have never seen a company that could monitor, modernize, and then deploy updates to functioning applications without impacting the end users. This is a real game changer in the field of Software 3.0,” explains Ondřej Lipold. AppFactor has already deployed its solution at one of the largest banks in England and one of the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500 ranking.
The option mentioned above is also available for startups. They can use it as a continuous “pipeline” for debugging applications, and also to generate the rest of the code needed for fast, secure deployment of software to the cloud, based on code from part of the software.
For Tensor Ventures, which led the entire investment round, the AppFactor investment is another from its recently closed second deep tech fund. The fund now has €50 million (approximately CZK 1.2 billion) in capital ready to invest in the most promising technologies that are ahead of their time. Thanks to this fund, investors will once again have access to unique quantum, semiconductor, techbio, AI, and software 3.0 technologies.
