Finnish growth company Calcus.com brings native advertising to SMEs. The next steps on Calcus’s growth path include an equity offering, acquisitions, and an IPO.

“Marketers need to make a shift from ‘telling and selling’ to ‘native sharing’,” says Ville Maila, member of the board of native advertising company Calcus.com. Native advertising means publishing content, whether textual or video, within the media so that it blends into the editorial content of the media without being distracting. This new form of marketing is now increasingly starting to be used by small and medium sized enterprises.

“Over the recent years, more and more of the bulk of the SME iceberg has started to take its steps into the world of digital marketing with services such as Google’s Adwords. In a very short time, SMEs have become more open to these kinds of marketing investments,” Maila underlines the market potential.

Calcus’s edge over its competitors lies in its ability to serve small and medium-sized enterprises operating in business-to-business markets. “Big marketing agencies target big advertisers,they don’t care about SMEs. We have tailored our offering specifically to SMEs,” Maila says. “With this strategy, we have become the leader in native advertising in Finland.”

In Finland alone, Calcus reached a €3 million turnover and 17% EBITDA in 2016. The company seeks to boost growth with mergers and acquisitions, for which it is currently raising a €2 million funding on Invesdor.com. Afterwards Calcus will be exploring opportunities for an IPO.

”The estimated B2B SME market in Finland is around €80 million, so for an agile venture like Calcus we see a lot of growth in our IPO roadmap with two-digit gross margins. Old methods are not working. For example, the biggest B2B SME service provider in the field has €28 million in revenue and making a loss of €3M,” says Ville Maila. “Every company has a life cycle and in Calcus we are now seeing the moment of exponential growth.”

“Calcus.com is rapidly pushing native advertising to new segments and reaping the benefits,” says MikkoSavolainen, communications manager at Invesdor. “After the company’s pivot to native advertising in 2014, its growth looks promising and I think investors will find worth a good look.”

More about Calcus equity offering at Invesdor.com