- Climb Advisor's M&A Weekly
- Posts
- Climb's M&A Weekly: Thoma Bravo, Hg and Vista Equity Partners all feature
Climb's M&A Weekly: Thoma Bravo, Hg and Vista Equity Partners all feature
Thoma Bravo backed ConnectWise makes a double acquisition to bolster their cybersecurity and data protection offerings and Avalara aims to help small businesses get paid
Nick @ Climb
September 15, 2024
Welcome to Climb Advisor’s weekly deal newsletter highlighting transactions announced last week across the B2B tech landscape.
Climb Advisors is an M&A and credit advisory firm focused on B2B software and services companies in the range of $5m to $100m+ 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.
Thoma Bravo backed ConnectWise acquires Axient and SkyKick
Overview: ConnectWise, an IT management and business automation software provider helping MSPs manage their business, has announced a double acquisition. The first deal is for Denver based Axcient, a company which focuses on business continuity by offering data protection and disaster recovery solutions to their clients. Secondly, Seattle based SkyKick offers cloud backup and management software, with the acquirer aiming to reinforce their cybersecurity and data protection offerings by making these moves. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Two complementary deals here for Connectwise, acquired by Thoma Bravo in 2019 for a reported $1.5B. Data continues to be the story, with Connectwise offering an operating platform for managed service providers and IT services firms with capabilities such as business management (invoicing, proposals, KPI tracking), customer endpoint monitoring, & cybersecurity. Real-time data backup is a critical service to add to the toolkit and these acquisitions enhance that offer.
Hg and Mainsail Partners backed GTreasury adds CashAnalytics
Overview: GTreasury aims to serve finance teams by providing a set of software to compile and manage mission critical data across areas such as cash, payments and risk. This deal for CashAnalytics greatly enhances the value they can offer clients around cash flow management and analysis. The Dublin based company provides a cash forecasting and accounts receivable/payable analytics solution to over 1,000 business entities in 40+ countries, with companies continuing to focus on how best to optimize working capital. Read more here.
Climb Comment: GTreasury is a leader in treasury/Office of the CFO software and adds key cash forecasting strengths with this deal. Especially in a higher-risk macro climate cash forecasting is key to businesses and 65% of treasury groups marked it a top priority in a recent survey. CashAnalytics is a modern-generation, modular product with API integrations into banking & ERP systems for accurate predictive forecasting. Strong add for GTreasury.
Vista Equity Partners backed Avalara acquires Hopscotch
Overview: Avalara, a provider of tax compliance automation to businesses that was bought by Vista in August 2022 for $8.4B, is acquiring Hopscotch. The B2B payments startup had previously raised $10M in seed funding and focuses exclusively on small businesses, offering invoicing and bill pay features to help them get paid on time and control cash flow. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Avalara automates tax compliance - ranging from sales tax calculation to property & occupancy tax to issuance & e-file of 1099 & W9 forms for contractors - and they claim global brands such as Netflix, Zillow, & Thule among their customers. Hopscotch offers an invoicing & bill pay platform to SMBs. This deal gets Avalara immediate footprint into a large SMB ecosystem and deepens the payments aspect of the platform.
OceanSound Partners buys PAR Excellence Systems from Northlane Capital Partners
Overview: OceanSound is a growth-oriented PE firm that invests in tech and tech services companies in government and highly-regulated sectors. PAR provides government, non-profit, and private healthcare systems with inventory and supply chain management software. Read more here.
Climb Comment: PAR uses a blend of hardware & software to automate inventory management & keep stock of medical supplies at optimal levels without the need for employee counts. Their primary device is the “PAR Bin”- a sensor-equipped bin which uses weight to monitor stock of items and report real-time counts to a centralized software interface that ties into requisitions & ordering systems. This appears to be the initial healthcare focused transaction for Ocean Sound, who are targeting to close a $1.3B second fund, and we imagine they will make continued investments into the space.
eClinical Solutions receives major investment from GI Partners
Overview: eClincial Solutions has become the newest member of the GI Partners portfolio, with the PE firm that focuses on the healthcare, services and software sectors acquiring a majority stake in the company. Based in Boston, eClinical’s AI powered data & analytics platform helps life science companies manage and speed up clinical trials by providing more accurate and timely data. Read more here.
Climb Comment: eClinical Solutions has pioneered a platform which streamlines the clinical trial cycle by maintaining participant records and study data in a comprehensive platform. eClinical Solutions show around 400 employees on LinkedIn, with ~60% based in the USA and the remainder in India.
Article of the week
Big recent news in the SaaS world is Klarna announcing that (alongside layoffs) they are removing Salesforce & Workday and replacing with homegrown solutions. Some pundits suggested this was the opening bell in a larger trend of generative AI supplanting SaaS in the enterprise - others took a more critical view and pointed to other instanes of companies building internal tooling only to return to vendor systems. SaaS costs certainly can add up quickly, and sure, a CRM is ultimately a relational database with some APIs and bells & whistles, but the real cost comes in maintenance & DevOps, and in distraction. Vendors earn their margins via specialization & convenience and we believe that most business leaders will continue to be willing to pay a premium for that.
Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting.
All the best,
Nick