Climb Advisors Weekly M&A Deals Newsletter

The Week in Review

Author

Nick @ Climb
November 12, 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.

TA + Insight backed Advantive announces deal for Abaca Systems

Overview: Advantive provides mission critical software such as inventory, supply chain and warehouse management solutions to distribution and manufacturing companies, and they’ve just expanded their offerings to those located in Europe. By adding Abaca and their suite of packaging solutions, they are greatly augmenting their expertise around accounting, reporting, scheduling and document management. The UK-based startup, which staffs a team of 8 developers, will have a key role to play as Advantive continues to grow in European markets. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Advantive has been a strong player in the industrial software space since their formation in 2022 by TA Associates and ST6, and prior to that as several independent companies which preceded the platform. Insight - one of the leading global software investors - and OA Private Capital announced a strategic growth recapitalization this past September. The combination between TA and Insight - two powerhouse investors - certainly makes Advantive one to watch. These investors’ continued focus on industrial software is a positive signal for the numerous other groups investing in the space.

Abaca offers full-cycle packaging solutions - from invoice to packing to reporting, with additional services around barcodes and inventory management. Important piece of the manufacturing puzzle and a nice deal all around.

MarketingOps acquires MartechGuru to expand its tech stack

Overview: MarketingOps is a community-led platform and private network created to support marketing professionals. MartechGuru, whose founder is its sole employee, will enhance the platform’s offerings by adding capabilities such as document management, data capture and budget forecasting. These features will join current resources such as forums, conferences, job opportunities and industry studies, free of charge for platform subscribers. Read more here.

Climb Comment: MartechGuru solves a key problem - tech stack spend management and visibility. We all know how easy it is for SaaS subscription creep to make a real budgetary impact. There’s always one more tool that promises to do a job just a bit better, for a reasonable monthly fee. One could argue quite that the current level of spending on SaaS tools is a material form of capital allocation in a business. Beyond just spend visibility, MartechGuru has built a powerful platform that helps manage the day-to-day running a marketing organization. Makes sense for a group like MarketingOps - a talent network/expert community - to layer in another technical tool in the kit.

CanFY snapped up by Playbook to expand their AI capabilities

Overview: CanFY, which has developed a digital AI assistant, will allow Playbook to offer designers, photographers and other users of its visual cloud storage platform a wider range of services. The platform which is purposely built to fit the storage needs of creatives will now boast features such as facial and object recognition, auto-tagging, file organization and mood board creation. It’s also worth noting that their team of two who co-founded the company are joining Playbook as heads of Machine Learning and Partnerships. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Another interesting AI deal, with many of the same dynamics we’ve highlighted on other deals in recent weeks — a point tech solution to fold into a broader stack and skilled engineers to help modernize the acquiring org. “Search” is such a huge problem to solve in modern tech, with solutions arising around semantic/intent based search, speech-based search, and in this case, visual search. Playbook already offers tremendous value in terms of both cataloguing and collaboration, and CanFY will add automatic tagging of images into the stack, improving org-wide data hygiene, simplifying workflows, and generally improving the user experience.

TNS Communications acquired by Gemspring Capital backed Amplix

Overview: TNS provides various IT services such as cloud optimization, contact center management, internet connectivity and data management. Their addition to Gemspring’s Amplix, who provide similar tech optimization and advisory services, will see Amplix grow their customer base, with the former serving over 200 enterprises and SMBs across a wide range of markets. These clients will now have access to the enhanced capabilities Amplix provides whilst TNS will have significantly more resources at their disposal to expand their offerings. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Straightforward deal here - TNS consists of two experts in IT services/cybersecurity who have built 20+ years each of best practices for IT Service management and a network of 400+ service providers and partners. Amplix has substantial scale and an extensive client success team and this looks like a case where buyer, seller, and customers all win.

Engagedly acquires theEMPLOYEEapp to expand their offerings for deskless employees

Overview: Engagedly, provider of AI-powered talent management solutions, has added a communication platform for deskless employees to supplement their current offerings which include various performance management, employee experience and learning, and development solutions. Alongside their unlimited texting solution, theEMPLOYEEapp, which staffs 12 employees, also offers company intranet to allow workers access to essential information and documents from wherever they call their office. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Engagedly provides a full suite of OKR-based employee management tools - performance tracking, feedback reports, 360 reviews, coaching and collaboration tools. Where theEMPLOYEEapp seems to shine is in offering a mobile-first experience for deskless/remote workers. As we’ve mentioned before, HR platforms are really an area where ‘land-grabs’ tend to work well — once an org has implemented a HR platform it’s accretive to offer as many relevant services as possible, and head-to-head sales contests can be won on basis of having a single feature that is important to an enterprise champion.

Engagedly has around 120 employees per LinkedIn, with the majority of these in India, adding theEMPLOYEEapp’s 12 US/UK based workers represents a substantial lift in personnel.

Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting. We’ll be back next week with more deals.

All the best,

Nick

Nick Cellura

Principal, Climb Advisors