Globoforce
Location Dublin, Ireland           
URL www.globoforce.com
Founded 1999           
CEO Eric Mosley
Employees N/A
Funding $15 million, 3 rounds
Key Investors Benchmark Capital, Atlas Ventures, private investors Incentives drive every business—not least this one. Globoforce helps customers automate the running of their global employee and sales incentive programs, in whatever the language and currency the company operates. Incentive programs typically can run from 1 percent of a company’s total payroll, so automating the process can save organizations time and money. Globoforce counts GE, PG&E, and Dow Chemical among its customers, at least partly because it can integrate well with payroll systems such as PeopleSoft and SAP. But the incentive and compensation management business is getting competitive—larger companies like Callidus Software and startups like Xactly are all looking for a chunk of the market.

Icera Semiconductor
Location Bristol, U.K.
URL www.icerasemi.com
Founded 2002
CEO Stan Boland
Employees 115
Funding $100 million, 3 rounds
Key Investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital Icera Semiconductor develops wireless platforms for mobile terminals, including phones and personal media players. Its software-based wireless communication chip targets the delivery of multimode HSPDA cellular broadband solutions. Icera’s products are expected to be integrated into data cards on laptops in Europe and Asia later this year, with handsets to follow. The company’s goal is to build a global, Europe-based fabless chip company with staying power—a daunting task. But CEO Stan Boland remains confident. “Europe needs to have its own indigenous fabless cellular chip company and we are planning to be it,” he says.

I-Cue
Location London, U.K.
URL www.i-cue.co.uk
Founded 2005
CEO Marc Lewis
Employees 4
Funding $100,000, 1 round
Key Investors Benchmark Capital I-Cue describes itself as the intersection between Amazon and Apple’s iPod. The company’s plan to deliver written content to mobile handsets might have garnered just a fraction of the funding of other wireless startups, but it’s trying to take on Amazon, Sony Libre, and Audible. I-Cue says it has created a new way to display written content on mobile devices—either one word at a time or an auto queue format. Already the company says it has signed up 80 percent of U.K. publishers and counts McMillan and Harper Collins as customers. Benchmark could be looking at a quick flip, rather than long-term growth.  

Nexagent
Location Reading, U.K.
URL www.nexagent.com
Founded 2000
CEO Royce Murphy
Employees 57
Funding $52 million, 2 rounds
Key Investors Esther Dyson, Andrew Smith, Martin Velasco, Greg Lock, Tony Morris, Mike Reilly, Apax Partners, Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, iGabriel.net (now Pi Capital), Lago Ventures, Quester Capital Middleware might not be a sexy business, but it’s a necessary one. Nexagent provides telephone carriers, system integrators, and virtual network operators with technology to improve network efficiency and integration. The company does this through consulting, hardware to properly prioritize and route data, and CAD-like design tools. But Nexagent needs to build brand awareness and convince organizations that outsourcing their networks is a smart move. According to Gartner, studies clearly demonstrating the benefits of switching could be a good way to do just that.  

Rawflow
Location London, U.K.
URL www.rawflow.com
Founded 2003
CEO Mikkel Dissing
Employees 13
Funding $4 million, 1 round
Key Investors Benchmark Capital The market for high-quality video distribution over the Internet is heating up, and London’s Rawflow has something special to add: peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming. The company, which says it is just starting to negotiate large deals, licenses its servers and clients to content providers such as the Danish Broadcast Corporation. It’s looking to expand its customer list to aggregators like YouTube, as well as Internet carriers like Level 3. Broadcasting content over the Internet could make cable and IPTV walled gardens irrelevant. But the market lost a bit of steam in March when fellow Benchmark-funded P2P distributor Kontiki sold itself for a low bid to VeriSign.

Sulake
Location Helsinki, Finland
URL www.sulake.com
Founded 2000
CEO Timo Soininen
Employees 255
Funding $30 million,      3 rounds
Key Investors Elisa, Taivas, 3i, Benchmark Capital Perhaps it’s no surprise that Habbo Hotel, a virtual hangout place for teenagers with more than 6 million unique visitors per month, started in notoriously shy Finland. The company’s first chat room with avatars opened in 2000. Since then, Sulake has rolled out online youth communities in 17 different countries. The company’s business plan is far from straightforward: Sulake makes money by selling hotel credits that people redeem to decorate their virtual rooms. Sulake’s revenue more than doubled last year to over $30 million, but the company reported its first profitable quarter at the end of last year.  

Xeround Systems
Location Yehud, Israel
URL www.xeround.com
Founded 2005
CEO Sharon Barkai
Employees 30
Funding $6.5 million, 1 round
Key Investors Benchmark Capital, Giza Venture Capital The telecom industry anticipates stellar growth with next-generation networks and Xeround Systems plans to help by handling the anticipated massive demand in customer information requests. Xeround claims to be a specialist in providing databases for telcos—helping them transition to next-generation networks by processing a large number of real-time events fast. Xeround plans to sell its products as an embedded database, but it could be ahead of its time. Despite the cutting-edge technology, the company has yet to find large customers so it risks being pigeonholed in the telecom industry, while fighting off big competitors such as Oracle and MySQL.