17 May 2010

Helveta secures £5m investment in funding to support its rapid expansion in global forest and food sectors

London, United Kingdom, May 17 2010: Helveta Ltd, the provider of supply chain intelligence software, CI World™, announced today completion of a £5m equity financing. The round was led by BeCapital, with Carbon Trust joining as a new investor and continued support coming from existing investors Albion Ventures, Oxford Capital Partners and Succès Europe.

The investment underpins Helveta’s rapid expansion in its key geographic markets worldwide. Helveta’s CI World supply chain intelligence functionality enables public and private sector users in the forest and food products industries to provide full traceability and compliance verification capability for assets moving along global supply chains. In the forestry sector CI World is the only proven technology to provide automated Chain of Custody (CoC) management, Legality Assurance System (LAS) functionality and pro-active compliance with new US Lacey Act and European Union Due Diligence Regulation timber import legislation.

CI World is being used to monitor in excess of 2.7m hectares of forest across the Congo and Amazon basins and in South East Asia. Recent major contract wins include national timber traceability and compliance validation systems in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon. Once deployed,
these systems will increase significantly the total forest area monitored using Helveta technology. CI World is rapidly becoming the supply chain governance software platform of choice with countries becoming involved in the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) process. Recently Ghana became the first country to sign up to treaty commitments under FLEGT. As a result the Ghanaian government has selected Helveta to implement a Legality Assurance System for its timber sector.