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- Climb's M&A Weekly: Thoma Bravo, Marlin Equity, and Capacity all feature
Climb's M&A Weekly: Thoma Bravo, Marlin Equity, and Capacity all feature
Sophos makes all-cash acquisition and Marlin Equity takes a majority stake in Napier AI
Nick @ Climb
February 09, 2025
Welcome back to the Climb Advisors 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.
Sophos expands its presence in the cybersecurity market in all-cash deal
Overview: Sophos, backed by Thoma Bravo, has acquired Secureworks in an all cash deal for $859 million. Both companies are cybersecurity companies, and with the acquisition Sophos will now service over 28,000 organizations worldwide. Secureworks Taegis platform will be integrated into Sophos’ end-to-end cybersecurity offerings. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Cybersecurity continues to be an active sector. Thoma Bravo closed on a $5.3 billion acquisition of Darktrace earlier this year. As of August, Dell owned ~80% of Nasdaq-listed Secureworks and controlled 97% of voting rights. They’d looked to divest a few times, including a Morgan Stanley led process in 2019. Sophos and Thoma Bravo made the deal at a 28% premium to recent share price, representing a ~3x multiple on $288m in ARR as of Q3 ‘24 at roughly breakeven ebitda.
Marlin Equity Partners take a majority stake in Napier AI
Overview: Marlin Equity Partners has made a majority investment in Napier AI, a compliance technology firm that specializes in anti-money laundering software. Napier uses AI and automation to track down financial crimes to help Compliance departments. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Marlin Equity has made a name in cybersecurity, with 3 current cyber businesses in the portfolio & seven exits in the space. Napier, founded in 2015, had raised $55.8 million in funding, most £45m in February ‘24 from Crestline. Napier focuses on AI-enhanced regulatory compliance and AML software, and serves more than 100 of the world’s leading financial institutions.
Tidalis acquires a maritime SaaS provider
Overview: Tidalis, a portfolio company of Agilitas Private Equity, acquired Made Smart Group. Tidalis was formerly Saab’s Maritime Traffic Management, and is a maritime software provider. Made Smart Group is a SaaS company that specializes in information services for the maritime industry. This move will now combine Tidalis’s software with Made Smart’s extensive data and technology. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Tidalis serves shipping companies and ports worldwide with digitization efforts. They serve ports like Los Angeles, Dubai, Rotterdam, & Halifax with vessel traffic control systems and port management. Made Smart Group was a Dutch company focusing on consulting services including asset-tracking for the maritime sector. Combining MSG’s deep well of data & industry expertise with Tidalis’ software will lead to further improvements across the space.
Capacity continues its M&A activity with acquisition of YouCanBookMe
Overview: Capacity, an AI platform designed for businesses to automate customer support and workflows, has acquired a scheduling company with over 19,000 customers all over the world. YouCanBookMe is a tool that automates scheduling and booking for companies across multiple calendars. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Capacity has been on an M&A spree, with this marking the ninth announced transaction of the past few years. Capacity has a view to automate customer support across channels and functionalities, and here they add scheduling into the mix. Climb advised Envision on their sale to Capacity over the summer, deepening Capacity’s strengths in the contact center market, alongside other acquisitions in enterprise knowledge management and voice technology. Capacity closed a $26m Series D late last year and is busy putting that capital to work.
Capacity CEO David Karandish said of the transaction -
“We realized pretty early on that people wanted our AI to talk with their existing systems. If we can take expertise around booking meetings at scale, and you take our expertise on AI, it is a great combination.“
Kudos to all involved!
Smarsh has acquired CallCabinet
Overview: Smarsh, a cloud-based compliance communications solutions provider has acquired CallCabinet, a company that specializes in call recording and compliance software. As regulation increases, more companies need to record communications and CallCabinet has the technology to do so and keep up with the regulatory environment. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Smarsh focuses on digital communications intelligence, with strengths in regulated industries such as banking and law enforcement. CallCabinet provides fully compliant call recording and voice analytics technology to similar organizations. With this combined platform, customers will be able to record and store voice calls from mobile networks, Teams, Zoom, and more, and will be able to keep that data stored in the cloud without having to upload from the device - ensuring compliance while still empowering business users to leverage their proprietary call intelligence.
Article of the week
Wild ride/cautionary tale from TechCrunch this week regarding the recent shutdown of Bench - a cloud accounting firm which burned through $135m from founding in 2012 to shutdown in September ‘24. From March ‘22 to March ‘23 Bench lost almost $30m on $42m in revenue - cuts were made and for the next fiscal year revenue grew to $49m with ~$15m in burn. In the end, venture debt was called and the dominoes fell. Worth a read.
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