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Climb Advisors Weekly M&A Deals Newsletter
Black Mountain Software acquires Cascade, Nordic Capital buys ActiveViam
Nick @ Climb
March 03, 2024
Welcome to Climb Advisor’s weekly deal newsletter highlighting transactions announced last week across the B2B tech landscape.
Climb Advisors is an M&A and credit advisory firm focused on B2B software and services companies in the range of $5m to $100m+ enterprise value. We guide CEOs and business owners through the process of selling their business & assist investors in sourcing & closing great deals. We love to talk markets and share beneficial information - please reach out any time.
Strategic govtech deal sees Peterson Partners backed Black Mountain Software acquire Cascade Software Systems
Overview: Black Mountain Software provides account and billing software to local government agencies including municipalities, counties, special districts and schools across the United States. The addition of Cascade and their specialized cost accounting solutions will further cement their position as a govtech leader. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Black Mountain offers a full-suite ERP built for governments and deepens their offerings for customers with this deal. Cascade’s core offer is their ‘WIN-CAMS’ product, which started out as a project cost accounting solution for public works & roads departments and has since expanded. These modular systems track things like cost per service request, fleet maintenance, bridge maintenance history & more. Public agencies require detailed reporting on an almost line-item level basis — Black Mountain bringing this granular reporting into their broad suite looks like a win all around.
PE firm Nordic Capital announces majority investment in ActiveViam
Overview: Nordic’s deal for Zafin recently featured in our newsletter and the PE firm has just made another play in the financial services industry. ActiveViam provides data analytics and decision making solutions to financial institutions such as banks, hedge funds, asset managers, exchanges and regulators. This investment fuels product expansion around regulatory compliance, real-time monitoring and historical analysis of performance, risk management and financial planning. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Great to see Nordic staying active and continuing to deploy cash in a sector they know well. ActiveViam helps banks and funds manage risk & compliance alongside trading activity, covering things like position sizing, currency exposure risk, and providing accurate P&L reporting around trade activity. Seems that the compliance angle remains attractive to acquirers, especially in complex and regulated industries.
ScienceIO acquired by Veradigm to boost AI capabilities
Overview: ScienceIO, a provider of AI solutions to the healthcare industry such as patient anonymization, record linkage, information extraction, summarization and predictive analytics, has been acquired by Veradigm (NASDAQ: MDRX) in a $140m cash deal. By making this move Veradigm will be able to leverage ScienceIO’s platform on its own data set of over 400,000 providers and 200 million patients, using AI to fast track the launch of new features across their business. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Veradigm provides data and analytics solutions to the healthcare industry and here acquires a powerful technology which will help to drive innovation from within. Veradigm owns massive volumes of data, and via the integration of ScienceIO will be able to build bespoke models on top of that data. This is a profile we’re seeing more of lately - a larger industry player with strong distribution and proprietary data acquires an AI forward startup with the rationale of layering AI on top of existing business and driving business transformation.
FranConnect acquires RizePoint to help franchises manage compliance and maintain quality
Overview: This deal sees FranConnect, a leading provider of sales, operations, and marketing solutions to franchises and multi-location businesses, boost the quality management capabilities of their platform. RizePoint supplies global restaurant, retail, and hospitality brands with mobile auditing and inspection software that can be used for location audits, health and safety checks, and supplier management. Read more here.
Climb Comment: FranConnect has historically focused on the franchise space specifically and here deepens capabilities in multi-location business overall. Backed by Serent Capital, FranConnect has made two other acquisitions in the past four years. Combined, the platforms will serve customers at more than one million end locations.
Bow River Capital invests in Accelo
Overview: Bow River Capital, an alternative asset manager focusing on the lower middle market, has acquired a majority stake in Accelo. The Denver based company provides professional services businesses with a work management platform that helps automate tasks such as sales and quoting, project management, ticketing, time tracking, billing, retainers and reporting. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Accelo serves as a ‘work management platform’ - something of a mix between a CRM and and ERP and project management - basically the ‘glue’ for running a service based organization. Customers highlight the ability to move between quoting projects, sending proposals and invoicing, and then moving into service delivery management. Accelo integrates with other key platforms like Salesforce & Quickbooks to help clients manage work via automation.
Bow River Capital's Maitlan Cramer stated, "We've invested approximately three years developing a detailed action plan and investment thesis for Accelo and see enormous opportunity in the multi-billion-dollar addressable PSA market; we're poised to kick-off our plans with Accelo on day one."
Impressive to see a deal take place after three years of careful analysis. Kudos to all involved.
Short post of the week - how to do stuff
We loved this framework from the guys over at Permanent Equity on how to get work done. We all suffer from never ending to-do lists and they share a practical and thoughtful flowchart approach to doing the tasks. At the least, it is interesting to read in the context of your work or maybe it resonates and you start implementing some of the steps tomorrow morning! Here is the post.
Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting.
All the best,
Nick