March the 30th, 2023 - The European Commission (EC) has finally given the green light for Google to purchase the Croatian Photomath, the brainchild of the remarkable entrepreneur Damir Sabol.
As Josipa Ban/Poslovni Dnevnik writes, as stated above, the European Commission, more precisely the body's Directorate General for Market Competition, has approved Google's purchase of the genius Croatian Photomath.
"The European Commission has concluded that the transaction does not lead to a distortion of market competition within the European Economic Area," the Commission's decision reads. With this decision, the conditions for the implementation of the takeover agreement, which Google and Photomath signed back in May 2022, have officially been met.
This will also be one of the biggest acquisitions of a Croatian technology company ever, and as touched on above, we are talking about the company that Damir Sabol founded back in 2016, which developed an extremely innovative application (app) for solving all kinds of mathematical problems.
Google requested the approval of this takeover from the European regulatory body for the protection of market competition on February the 21st this year, and the decision was finally made this week.
The amount for which Google bought one of the most successful domestic apps ever made, which has been downloaded as many as 300 million times, is still unknown, but it is speculated that it is an acquisition that could be one of the largest in the domestic technology sector to have ever occurred. So far, the biggest yet is the 2020 takeover of video game maker Nanobit by Sweden's Stillfront for 148 million US dollars.
The Croatian Photomath is registered right here in the City of Zagreb, but also across the pond over in the USA. According to the data kept by Poslovna Hrvatska/Business Croatia, the domestic branch generated a massive 5.85 million euros in revenue back in 2021. On top of all of that, entrepreneur Damir Sabol successfully attracted a total of 29 million US dollars of investments in a mere six years. The last one, carried out a couple of years ago, from Menlo Ventures, GSV Ventures, Learn Capital, Cherubic Ventures and Goodwater Capital, was worth 23 million dollars.
This is the third company that Damir Sabol founded and developed and the second that he has successfully sold. The first was Iskon, which was sold to Hrvatski Telekom/Croatian Telecom for 100 million kuna. He then founded Microblink, which develops mobile document scanning, and Photomath was created as its spinoff. Silversmith Capital Partners invested 60 million dollars in Microblink back in 2020, but Sabor remained a co-owner of this company.
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