The history of the Fonn Group technology companies
It’s always a good test to ask why people do what they do. That's also the case with launching new companies and products. Let me share some insights about our “why” in Fonn Group and the primary drivers behind our group product companies.
To understand us, you need to know where we come from. Back in 2016, Fonn Group was a merger of three system integration companies in Scandinavia. In reality, it was six companies since two of the companies had acquired other companies. So six companies with different cultures and different approaches to the world. All are small enough to have the lunch table as the central point of their strategy discussions and business development.
The main investor in Fonn Group is the family-owned Rieber & Søn AS. They saw the acquisition of these three companies as an opportunity to enter the media and entertainment vertical and to build products.
Today, the three (six) companies are Mediability, a successful ProAV system integrator with fantastic results. Mediability is a European leader in NDI-based production workflows and building studios Pan-Scandinavia and the UK (read more about Mediability here).
Developing Mediability into a modern and profitable system integrator has been quite a journey and a good exercise for the Fonn Group management team. Owning a company with over 200 vendors as partners and reselling products and services in multiple verticals has developed our understanding of the business and the market in a unique way.
New product companies are emerging
The plan we formed in 2017 was to build an offering that would make a difference in the content production world. It is about making everyday life a little easier for our customers through new technology through an ongoing innovation journey. That journey always begins with our customers and the customers' needs. For that, you need customers, people, focus and discipline. And you need a good, passionate and patient investor. The family-owned Rieber & Søn AS is an industrialist dating back 180 years of investments and supporting inventions and great initiatives. Read more about Rieber & Søn here.
We focused on building something new and innovative that could rest on technologies developed by giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. At IBC 2018, we showed our first proof-of-concept (POC) for a cloud-native archive solution for video content where AI-APIs from Amazon Web Services created all metadata. The POC process took only about one month with the only three developers we had on staff. We did a lot of smoke and mirrors on the show, which was a huge success. We left the show with enough qualified leads to confirm that we hit the market with a good idea and a relevant offering. We secured the first paying customers only six months from writing the first line of code.
At that same IBC, we were in active negotiations with 7Mountains AS to invest in their new company. 7Mountains was a group of technologists with backgrounds mainly from Mozart and Vizrt. Their idea was to create a tool to address the new reality for content producers, solving the challenge of multi-platform publishing. Multi-platform publishing had been a trend in the market for years, but no proper tools existed to address the market needs.
The first innovative customer
2019 was the year when the Fonn Group product companies 7Mountains and Mjoll established themselves in the market.
Connected with Vizrt’s Viz Pilot Edge and Viz Mosart as a playout system, we saw the contours of a new production system. That same year we signed a contract with the highly innovative TV2 FYN in Denmark, which decided to replace old workflows and tools with a cloud-based platform available to journalists and producers worldwide.
Their timing could not have been better. It took us a year to design and build the workflow for TV 2 Fyn. For our team, it was an enormous team inspiration and effort to create something great and fill a gap in the market. 7Mountains developed Dina as a product in close collaboration with our Danish friends. Mimir by Mjoll developed from a cloud archive into a fully-featured Cloud PAM with deep integrations to Adobe Premiere.
The TV 2 Fyn project played an essential role in building an integrated workflow between our two products, which has been a killer in the market for the last couple of years.
The cloud-native product package gained even more momentum during the pandemic when work-from-anywhere became the overnight primary tech trend in video production.
In contrast to many of our competitors, the young Fonn Group product companies came out of the pandemic with 50+ customers, a new toolset for professional production and a pipeline that looks very promising.
Want to learn about story-centric workflows with Dina?
FREE Ebook by Mads Grønbæk, CTO in 7Mountains and Emily Dawson, Managing Director in Stem Media: “The principles of story-centric workflows”. Download your copy:
