Jalbum appoints Skype co-creator as CEO and closes second round of investment with Nordic Venture Partners
Jalbum, the leading community for personalized photo sharing, announced that its board of directors has named Andreas Sjölund the new Chief Executive Officer of Jalbum and closed a second round of investment with Nordic Venture Partners.
A serial entrepreneur, Sjölund brings with him 12 years of experience in creating and developing consumer Internet companies. Most notably, Andreas was a co-creator and the first product manager of Skype and one of the first employees in KaZaA - two of the world's most notorious and fastest growing Internet ventures to date. Jalbum founder David Ekholm will stay actively involved with the company as CTO and will remain on its board of directors.
"We are very excited to welcome Andreas Sjölund as the new CEO of Jalbum," said Ekholm. "In addition to his stellar track record of entrepreneurial leadership with KaZaA and Skype, Andreas shares our passion for creating the best photo sharing solutions for our growing community."
"I am ecstatic about joining David and the Jalbum team at such a pivotal time in the company's history," Sjölund said. "I've been a regular user of the free Jalbum software for several years, using it to share my personal photo collection online in great looking web albums. The potential for Jalbum to give everyone with a digital camera the power to easily control the presentation of their images and determine where they are hosted is truly disruptive. We've only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with this unique distribution model."
Jalbum also announced today the closing of a second round of financing from Nordic Venture Partners, bringing total capital raised to 23 Million SEK (approx $3.2 million). The round will be used to accelerate product and business development.
Per von Zelowitz, Partner of Nordic Venture Partners: "Jalbum is one of the leading global online photo sharing communities. They are the only one with the clear differentiators of freedom of expression, sharing and distribution. We are very pleased with the fantastic growth the company has achieved and are excited to support its continued expansion and substantially strengthened management team. We are confident about the commercial prospects for Jalbum in this large and rapidly growing market."
For more information, please contact:
Carl Manneh, Media Relations, Jalbum.net, +46 735 244 580, email: carl@jalbum.net
Per von Zelowitz, Partner, Nordic Venture Partners, +46 706 523 141, email: pvz@nordic.com