Dublin e-commerce firm raises #5.3m

Sepro, a Dublin company specialising in network rating and billing software, has raised #5.3 million (£4.2 million) to help it introduce its suite of products globally. Trinity Venture Capital and Davy Stockbrokers' private clients will provide the cash to Sepro, whose initial funding came from private investors.

"We will be growing the company, mostly in sales and marketing but also in research and development," said Mr Declan Ganter, Sepro's co-founder and chief executive. The company currently employs 54 people and is based in Dublin, with small sales offices in London and Virginia in the US. The company will target both the European and US markets with its network analysis software, E-Rate, which allows organisations to monitor voice, data and content passing over their networks.

Marrakesh, the online procurement company based in the Republic, uses the product, as does US mobile network operator CellularOne.

E-Rate enables organisations to charge for data traffic over their networks by the value placed on the product rather than by volume, said Mr Martin Morgan, Sepro's marketing director. He cited as an example the download of an MP3 music file, typically a large size. Customers will become annoyed if they are charged by the download size of the file, when, what they are really interested in is getting, say, the latest song by Madonna.

"Shops don't sell products by the shelf space they occupy, they sell them by their value," he said. Network operators and content providers need to move to a value rather than volume model, he added.

However, network operators and service providers can only measure data traffic by volume at present. Network analysis software lets companies break down traffic according to the type of file being sent, or Web page accessed. They can then charge customers on the basis of the value of the file, as well as manage all the payments that may need to be made to other organisations within the file's "value chain" - copyright holders, content producers and so on.

Mr Morgan said media companies, for example, could charge for premium content using the software. An Internet user might click on a headline and, after reading a story, be offered additional, relevant stories at a small cost. Ticketing agencies offering tickets over mobiles could charge a regular ticket-handling fee using the software, whereas traditional billing systems would only see the transaction as a 10p SMS message.

Mr Ganter said the company would probably seek substantial further funding with a large US venture capital firm within the year and perhaps look at a public offering in two to three years.