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Climb Advisors Weekly M&A Deals Newsletter
The Week in Review
Nick @ Climb
December 10, 2023
Welcome to Climb Advisor’s weekly deal newsletter highlighting transactions announced last week across the B2B tech landscape.
Climb Advisors is an M&A advisory firm focused on B2B software and services companies in the range of $5m to $50m+ 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.
Gemspring Capital exits Valant Medical Solutions
Overview: Gemspring announced the sale of Valant to an affiliate of Resurgens Technology Partners. The Seattle startup’s platform helps behavioral healthcare providers manage electronic health records and practices; with key features including documentation, ePrescribing, scheduling, billing, and online payments. Since Gemspring’s 2019 investment Valant has grown to a team of 80 employees serving more than 22,000 health professionals across the US. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Two interesting elements to call out here. First being the tremendous tailwinds behavioral health as a category is seeing in the US lately, driven by the destigmatization of mental health care, wider acceptance of holistic care models, and a slew of other factors on both the supply and demand side of the equation. We’re seeing roll-ups and new build ventures of behavioral health practices, tech-driven/telehealth models, and care being offered as a benefit in addition to standard benefits by many corporations. This is all a net-positive for society and will be lucrative for many players along the way.
Secondly, this points to the value of verticalized solutions. EHR have been around a long time and in many ways the first wave of EHR providers have reached legacy status and been fodder for aggregator roll-ups. The alpha is in businesses which have cornered an end-market and provide solutions which compel decision-makers to take a gamble on a new solution vs a familiar (and dated) industry standard. Congrats to all involved on this one.
WireWheel acquired by Osana to enhance their data privacy solutions
Overview: The addition of WireWheel will help Austin based Osana reinforce their position as a leader in data privacy management. The former’s enterprise grade data privacy assessment tools automate vital processes such as auditing data, identifying privacy risks, and creating required documentation. Read more here.
Climb Comment: When you ‘accept cookies’ on a website, there’s a good chance you’re interacting with Osana. They provide the full suite of data privacy coverage including vendor management, 3rd party risk assessment, and mapping of how user data flows across a web property/ecosystem, but their most widely known feature is ‘cookie consent’ which handles over one billion (!) requests each month and offers compliance in the 50+ countries which have data privacy laws related to web cookies.
WireWheel provides assessment tools which complement this platform quite well and incorporate some robust tech. An important piece of context from the acquisition PR:
The integration of these assessment solutions into the Osano platform will also be valuable for companies pursuing AI initiatives which utilize corporate data models ... The capabilities that WireWheel brings to the Osano platform will enable companies to pursue these AI initiatives with confidence.
The generative AI revolution is such a huge driver for M&A as we are seeing every week. Osana raised $25m in August and continues to seek strategic investments.
Hudson Hill Capital announces majority investment in MarketTime
Overview: The New York PE firm has announced a significant investment in MarketTime, a sales enablement software for B2B sales organizations that last raised capital with a $15m Series B round in October 2021. MarketTime’s platform helps make product discovery and ordering easier for buyers whilst helping sellers organize and share information more securely. Their solutions automate repeated interactions for buyers and sellers and they also offer branded websites and analytics tools to brands, agencies, and retailers. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Nice deal here for Hudson Hill, founded by Eric Rosen, formerly a partner with MSD Capital (the family office of Michael Dell). Hudson Hill is focused on building a concentrated portfolio of strong, founder-led businesses.
MarketTime is a B2B wholesale platform which enables 3 million + orders annually across 6,500 brands and 300,000 buyers. Beyond serving as a wholesale platform they offer sales-enablement tools for reps to include order writing, sales reporting, territory/commission management and more. All designed to remove friction from the B2B sales process and drive bottom line for buyers & sellers. Great investment by HHC.
Zilliant supplements organic growth with acquisition of In Mind Cloud
Overview: Zilliant is using M&A to build on its biggest quarter in recent history with the acquisition of In Mind Cloud. It provides software to optimize and manage pricing based on changing market inputs, saw over 75% year-over-year bookings growth last quarter. This momentum should continue to grow with the addition of In Mind Cloud’s digital sales platform purpose-built for manufacturers. Their solutions help quote for complex projects and manage sales enquiries and customer relationships, meaning clients can now control their entire pricing lifecycle on Zilliant’s platform. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Following the theme of streamlining B2B commerce we see the acquisition of InMindCloud by Zilliant. Zilliant offers a full suite of ‘price management’ products for enterprise — taking into account current and forecasted changes in input price and availability, logistics factors, elastic demand, and more.
InMindCloud provides a modernized, ‘Amazon-like’ CPQ (configure/price/quote) system mostly to manufacturers. Great quote from InMindCloud Chairman Dr. Christian Cuske in the press release for the deal:
“Product complexity can be a competitive advantage, but it’s detrimental to a company if it’s complex to do business with them.”
These two companies combining forces will reduce complexity to do business with a number of organizations and drive profit for customers around the globe.
Workleap acquires Pingboard to broaden US footprint
Overview: Workleap, an employee experience platform, recently raised $125m CAD from the CDPQ (Québec’s $424B CAD pension fund) to accelerate growth. By adding Pingboard and their team of 38 employees they do just that. Their solutions include a comprehensive employee directory, organizational charts, surveys, and peer recognition. This will prove a strong addition to Workleap’s platform which helps onboard new employees & build, manage, and monitor their training. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Workleap has thrived in the last few years helping organizations navigate the transition to remote work and then back again to the office or hybrid configurations by building simple and powerful software that enables great employee experience.
Their platform includes an LMS, an onboarding solution, an intranet/collaboration product, a career development product, an employee recognition/’kudos’ product and now Pingboard’s comprehensive employee directory. Great fit here as both a standalone offering and as a connector piece across the rest of Workleap’s solutions. Workleap expands their US footprint as well with this deal and adds relationships with Pingboards 2,000+ customers.
Podcast recommendation
I am sure many of you listen to the All-In podcast already but wanted to highlight this week’s episode as they had an interesting conversation around the economy and how it relates to software valuations in today’s market. Starts around 22 minutes in. Here is podcast link
Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting. We’ll be back next week with more deals.
All the best,
Nick