German firm buys HighJump Software; Astropad raises funds

International technology group Korber of Germany acquired Bloomington-based HighJump Software, which has been owned since 2014 by Colorado-based Accellos Software.

Terms were not disclosed.

HighJump will be part of Korber's business-area logistics systems group that includes recently acquired American firm DMLogic, said Hubert Kloss, CEO of the group.

"With our new HighJump colleagues on board, we now have a very solid basis, both in Europe and the USA, to continue our dynamic growth," Kloss said in a statement.

HighJump CEO Chad Collins said the firm has about 100 local employees and 450 in North America.

HighJump grew from $150 million in revenue in 2014 to $175 million in 2016.

"Longer term, this [ownership by Korber] will give us access to more products, to the European market and more capital for acquisitions," Collins said. "We have a new holding-company owner, but we stay 'HighJump' and nothing changes in day-to-day interactions with customers."

Accellos Software acquired HighJump in 2014 for an unspecified price.

Accellos was fueled with expansion capital through its majority-stake sale earlier to Accel-KKR, a deep-pockets Silicon Valley private equity firm.

Neal St. Anthony

Astropad, a 2015 Minnesota Cup grand-prize winner, has raised about $370,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to finance its latest product.

Online publication Tech.Mn said it's the most lucrative crowdsource fundraiser since those of Spark and SmartThings, local firms that eventually moved to California.

Astropad marketing director Savannah Reising said the fundraiser runs through Oct. 19. Proceeds will fund manufacturing of Astropad's new Luna Display. She described the thumb-drive-size product as "a tiny key that you plug into your Mac display port, and it turns your iPad into a second display for your Mac."

The company, which employs six and is based in northeast Minneapolis, is preselling the product on Kickstarter for $65; less than others will pay once Luna goes into production with a yet-unspecified manufacturer. The product should start arriving next spring.

Ronge told Tech.Mn that nothing approaches the quality of Luna Display. And Techcrunch.com gave it a thumbs-up review.

Reising said Astropad's revenue will double this year for the third year in a row. She declined to cite a dollar figure.

Neal St. Anthony

Melvin Tennant of Meet Minneapolis, speaking to 850 attendees at a three-day downtown conference last week of the U.S. Travel Association's annual Educational Seminar for Tourism Organization (ESTO), said a record 33 million visitors injected $7.6 billion in spending on hotels, restaurants, shopping and otherwise in the area.

By contrast, tourism-heavy Las Vegas drew about 43 million people last year.

"Our goal is 50 million visitors by 2030," Tennant said. "The ESTO conference is important because any time we can bring our industry together in our city, it's a great opportunity.

"We welcomed other visitor services people from around the country to our Minneapolis Visitor Information center [downtown]. It was an opportunity to show what we've done and what's been successful for us, and to hear about what others are doing that we may want to consider."

And it doesn't take a Super Bowl, which is coming to Minneapolis in February, to ring cash registers.

Big events next year include the American Legion National Convention with 9,500 attendees, the NCAA Division I Volleyball Championship (13,000 attendees) and the National Education Association annual meeting of 16,000 attendees.

At the same conference, Minnesota tourism director John Edman said the state generated $14.4 billion from tourism in 2015, about $40 million a day, and 260,000 related jobs.

That amounts to about 11 percent of the state's private sector employment and $5.1 billion in wages.