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- Climb's M&A Weekly: Cuadrilla Capital, Klevu, and Agiloft all feature
Climb's M&A Weekly: Cuadrilla Capital, Klevu, and Agiloft all feature
Cuadrilla acquires Repsly, Klevu merges with Searchspring, and Agiloft acquires Generative AI legal review platform.
Nick @ Climb
January 19, 2025
Excited to be back to the weekly newsletter with five deals from across the B2B tech landscape. Sentiment is strong in the M&A community, with many expecting 2025 to be a record year in terms of deal volume & aggregate value. Valuations are strong & buyers are eager to deploy capital.
Climb Advisors focuses on sell-side advisory for B2B Software and services companies generating $5m-$15m in revenue. We also advise on credit placements and non-dilutive capital 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 connect dots - please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re a founder or investor looking to transact.
Cuadrilla Capital acquires Repsly
Overview: Cuadrilla Capital, a PE firm focusing on enterprise software, has acquired Repsly, a retail execution software platform serving consumer product goods companies and retail service providers. Repsly’s platform enables companies to drive more sales by centralizing their in-store data— Cuadrilla will bring their deep network and expertise in scaling saas to the business. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Cuadrilla, with more than $500m in AUM, has made prior inroads into retail with companies like Agilence & IntelliQ, both focused on loss prevention and operational analytics for retailers and restaurants. Per Repsly CEO, Matthew Brogie - “Repsly's market leading Retail Execution Platform enables brands to drive more sales at the shelf by centralizing their sales, field activity and in-store data, and connecting store-level activities with their impact on sales.” With Repsly having built-in AI functionality, surely exciting things to come.
Klevu and Searchspring announce they are merging to form Athos Commerce
Overview: Klevu, an AI-powered personalized search and product discovery platform, has announced they are merging with Searchspring, an e-commerce personalization solutions provider. The companies are forming Athos Commerce and will combine Klevu’s AI-powered search and Searchspring’s personalized merchandising tools to provide personalized, data-driven shopping experiences and drive shopper engagement and conversion. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Search represents one of the core challenges in any web-based commerce — customers spell words wrong, don’t know exact terms or model numbers, & search for any number of wildcard descriptors. Companies like Searchspring & Klevu offer NLP (Natural Language Processing) powered search that directly translates to improved conversions and sales for retailers. The combined platform will also offer personalized customer journeys & robust analytics. PSG invested in Searchspring in 2022, in 2023 a new CEO came onboard, and the integrated platform is slated to go live in Q3 of this year.
Agiloft acquires Screens
Overview: Agiloft, a contract lifecycle management (CLM) provider has acquired Screens, a Generative-AI contract review and redlining solution. This acquisition allows Agiloft to standardize and promote consistency throughout the contract review process, with the manual work and time saved due to AI-powered review tools adding a massive value to clients. Read more here.
Climb Comment: One of the key real-world use cases for Gen AI so far has been in contract review. LLMs, especially when fine-tuned, do a really good job of ingesting unstructured or loosely-structured data (like contracts) and pattern matching against a memory bank. Screens users can create community-based templates which highlight acceptable standards in a contract (think NDA exclusion periods, jurisdiction, Uptime reqs & other SLA points) and then check & redline in a no-code editor. Huge win for Agiloft, which received majority investment from KKR in May of 2024.
Arbiter acquires rSchoolToday
Overview: Arbiter, an athletic and event management software company, has acquired rSchoolToday(rST), a platform for K-12 school-related activities to deepen their presence in education scheduling and communication. Arbiter will now be able to combine its game and officiating scheduling with rST’s suite of solutions for schools and sports to provide a smoother and more efficient platform to manage both school and extracurricular activities. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Serent Capital acquired Arbiter from the NCAA in 2017, who had acquired it in 2008 - the original system was built for the Utah High School Activity Board in 1984 on MS-DOS as a way to assign officials to sporting matches, and in 2003 it was deployed as a web application. Fascinating to see that kind of staying power and the iterations the business has gone through, with this latest acquisition adding 11,000 schools, districts and colleges & a complementary suite of scheduling, facilities, admin, and payments solutions.
Crimson Phoenix, backed by Godspeed Capital, continues recent M&A activity by buying Blackspoke
Overview: This announcement marks the AI-powered data intelligence company’s fifth acquisition since Godspeed invested in 2023. Blackspoke provides secure network and infrastructure solutions. Crimson Phoenix is established in data-labeling and geospatial intelligence; Blackspoke has additional expertise in integrating these solutions into the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency infrastructure. Read more here.
Crimson Phoenix has made a strong name serving the intelligence community and here adds nearly 100 highly trained and security cleared full-time employees to the organization. On large Federal contracts, having qualified employees at the ready makes all the difference in winning the deal, and this acquisition provides those wins all around & enables both teams to continue delivering crucial intelligence for critical national security initiatives.
Article of the week
Interesting piece here on the emergence of AI rollup plays. The author argues that acquisition of old-economy services businesses and aggressive implementation of AI-driven cost reduction may represent an investment strategy with parallels to the success of vertical software rollups over the past decades. No shortage of discussion around this topic — will be interesting to see how it plays out.
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