Climb Advisor's M&A Weekly
Posts
Climb's M&A Weekly: Boeing, Thoma Bravo, and Gemspring all feature

Climb's M&A Weekly: Boeing, Thoma Bravo, and Gemspring all feature

Boeing sells Jeppesen unit to Thoma Bravo and Gemspring backs merger

Nick @ Climb
April 27, 2025

Welcome back to the Climb Advisors weekly newsletter with five deals from across the B2B tech landscape.

Climb Advisors focuses on sell-side advisory for B2B Software and services companies generating $5m-$15m in revenue. We also advise on credit solutions for companies of the same profile & in select cases engage in retained buy-side processes for quality buyers. We love to talk markets and make introductions - please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re a founder or investor looking to transact.

Email Schedule a call

Boeing sells its Jeppesen unit to Thoma Bravo

Overview: Boeing has announced it is selling parts of its digital aviation solutions division to Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion. This comes as Boeing is trying to offload some of its non-core assets in an attempt to reduce the company’s debt load. Boeing will retain some of the core digital capabilities from the Jeppesen business. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Boeing’s stock price closed at $177 on Friday, down from a peak of $424 in 2019. The planemaker has been hit hard by safety issues with its aircraft. Before Boeing merged with McDonell Douglas in 1997, the company was run by engineers focused on quality, whereas post-merger Boeing’s management became more focused on cutting costs and increasing buybacks to try and appeal to investors. This shift in focus has proven costly the past few years as the FAA had to ground many of their planes and customers scaled back orders. For all of its past mistakes, this deal looks solid for Boeing as the sale price values the business at ~16x 2025E EBITDA. Boeing acquired Jeppesen in 2001 for $1.5 billion and was trying to fetch a $6 billion valuation for the business, ultimately getting much higher.

Summit Partners invests in a grant solution provider

Overview: Summit Partners, a growth equity investment firm, invests $55 million into Instrumentl, a full-lifecycle grant solution platform. Summit Partners investment will be used to develop Instrumentl’s AI capabilities and scale U.S. customer acquisition. Instrumentl serves over 4,500 customers and has helped manage over $6 billion in grants. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Over the past few months, there has been an increasing level of oversight on nonprofits and universities obtaining grants. The process universities and nonprofits go through is a time consuming process involving multiple different tools and Instrumentl offers an end-to-end platform to manage this. Since inception in 2015, Instrumentl has raised over $1 billion in grant funding for customers through its unique AI-driven platform.

Apptegy makes acquisition of AlwaysOn

Overview: Apptegy, a provider of communication and brand management solutions for school districts, purchases AlwaysOn, a K-12 AI-powered chatbot. In less than a decade, Apptegy has grown to serve over 5,000 school districts across the country and plans to expand its reach with investment into AI capabilities. AlwaysOn will now be able to integrate its chatbot into Apptegy’s solutions serving a broader customer base than they were previously. Read more here.

Climb Comment: The SaaS space for education and K-12 school systems is rapidly growing as school systems digitalize. AlwaysOn’s main product is a multilingual AI chatbot that integrates with school systems’ webpages and allows for ease of use in the language of the user’s choice. Apptegy’s communications solutions include websites and apps that can now reduce response times with AlwaysOn’s chatbot.

Marlin Equity Partners simultaneously invests in Didomi and Addingwell

Overview: Marlin Equity Partners makes a majority growth investment in Didomi, a data privacy and consent management software provider. Didomi simultaneously acquired server-side tagging platform, Addingwell. Didomi raised €72 million from Marlin Equity to complete the acquisition of Addingwell. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Addingwell is Didomi’s second acquisition in an inorganic growth plan trying to capture more market share in the growing data privacy sector. Across the digital world, there is a shift from third-party cookies to organizations maintaining control over their data collection. Server-side tagging improves load times, data quality, and the user experience by limiting some of the cookies in the browser. Server-side tagging also allows the organization to decide what data it would like to collect rather than leaving it in the hands of a third party. Addingwell leverages these solutions to help companies increase their ROI on marketing as well.

Security 101 purchases Integrated Systems & Services

Overview: Security 101, a provider of commercial security solutions and backed by Gemspring Capital, buys Integrated Systems & Services, a security integrator (ISSI). Founded in 1993, ISSI designs, installs, and maintains electronic security systems across the Northeast. The company does a lot of work in high-security environments like healthcare and data centers. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Gemspring continues an active start to the year & Security 101 has made 16 acquisitions themselves, with this acquisition strengthening their presence in the New York Metropolitan area. Mission-critical security is as important as ever and demand for ISSI’s solutions should grow alongside a growing data center market.

Article of the week

Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re considering a sale this year - we’re always glad to chat & share perspective.

All the best,

Nick

^{Nick Cellura}

^{Principal, Climb Advisors}

^{Book a}^Call