CleverCards, the online and app-centred greetings cards business, has raised €2.4 million from shareholders in two allotments.

Laytons Trustee Company in London, Delta Equity and clients of Davy invested €690,000 in December 2015. The same investors followed on in February 2016 with a further €1.7 million, with Enterprise Ireland also contributing €50,000 on that occasion.

Between the two allotments, Laytons contributed €1.6 million and Delta invested €450,000.

Founded by Kealan Lennon (pictured), CleverCards, formerly known as Cleverbug, creates personalised greetings cards which can be sent electronically or printed out and posted.

The app presents users with a range of design and photo options and a text editing facility. Lennon told Business Plus in 2013: “There are over one billion users on Facebook and I read a stat that each user has an average of 100 friends. That’s effectively 100 billion connections and a market that is easy to target. Cleverbug is a disruptive play and we aim to really shake up the greeting cards market.”

In Association with

CleverCards partnered with printing facilities around the world who handle the printing and dispatch of the cards.

Equity investment in CleverCards is channelled through KPTRS Investments Holding Ltd, which was incorporated in March 2011. In June that year the company received investment of €126,000 from Laytons. That investor followed up with another €200,000 in November 2011, which coincided with a €1.3m investment from Delta Partners, the Dublin-based venture capital company.

In June 2013 Lennon secured €300,000 investment from Irish taxpayers through Enterprise Ireland.

K Partners

Lennon is a chartered accountant who started out working for BDO Simpson Xavier, followed by a sales role with an international beef trading company. He then set up his own financial consulting business and advised on the sale of pharmaceutical packaging business Karton Craft to Inishtech in the mid-1990s.

Lennon, 23 at the time, was asked by Inishtech to join the board and become the firm’s financial director. He later formed part of a group that carried out a management buyout of the company.

A few years later and that business was acquired by packaging giant MeadWestvaco Corporation, and Lennon was appointed as head of M&A for Europe. Lennon held that role until 2005 when his entrepreneurial aspirations led to him setting up K Partners, a private equity vehicle.

K Partners’ most notable deal saw it acquire school book publisher CJ Fallon in 2006. A year later and Lennon sold on two thirds of Fallon to Niall McFadden’s ill-fated investment vehicle Boundary Capital, before exiting completely in early 2013.

Lennon has also dabbled in property speculation, most notably through First UK Commercial Property Public Company Ltd, which was wound-up in April 2013 after issuing a declaration of solvency.

Lean Canvas

When it comes to raising money, Lennon is an advocate of Steve Blank’s Lean Canvas model. “The Lean Canvas is key to disrupting your target market and involves drawing three boxes on a single sheet of paper. The first box on the page asks, who is your customer? The second box asks, what three problems does that customer have? The third box says, what solution have you got to those three problems? From that canvas a firm gets its unique value proposition.”

The CleverCards trading company is KPTRS Investments Ltd, a subsidiary of KPTRS Investments Holding Ltd. The company booked a loss of €1.46m in 2013 and had a net worth of €515,000 at year-end.