Climb Advisors Weekly M&A Newsletter

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.

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Judicial Innovations acquired by Arlington Capital Partners backed Avenu Insights & Analytics

Overview: Judicial Innovations provides state and local government software to streamline payment and case management for the probation, court and traffic end markets. Their addition marks Avenu’s second deal in the payment solutions area in 2024, with the Washington based acquirer offering admin and revenue recovery solutions to governments. Read more here.

Climb Comment: More activity in the govtech space with this deal, and a payments angle as well. Avenu offers a range of solutions to local government, focusing on revenue collection, rental compliance/auditing, & tax and permitting solutions. Judicial Innovations provides a plug-in payments module for court systems to manage online traffic violation collections, probation, and general payments solutions. Judicial Innovations offers these platforms at no cost to the court system, monetizing via fees on payments. An interesting model - curious if Avenu will continue that monetization path or move to a more traditional license model.

Francisco Partners and Clearlake Capital backed Perforce Software acquires Delphix

Overview: Perforce provides enterprise solutions across a wide range of industries focused on improving quality, security, compliance, collaboration and speed throughout a company's technology lifecycle. This deal for Delphix helps address the increased emphasis organizations are placing on data management, governance and compliance. Their platform allows companies to automate data security measures, rapidly deploy test data to developers and shorten application development cycles. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Substantial deal here with Perforce adding a team of 600+ and a robust tech platform built with more than $120m in funding. Both platforms offer a full suite of solutions throughout the DevOps process, including enterprise planning & project management, compliance & support, and testing/debugging modules. Delphix takes a focus on the data & governance side of the equation, with powerful capabilities around managing the flow of data into and out of complex enterprise applications. As we’ve highlighted in past weeks — the flow and management of enterprise data is probably the single most important factor as enterprises look to leverage advances in AI technology.

Nordic Capital announces deal for Zafin

Overview: PE firm Nordic Capital has acquired a majority stake in Zafin to accelerate the company’s growth and product roadmap. Headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Zafin provides SaaS solutions to the financial services industry to manage pricing, products and packages whilst also streamlining other core banking services. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Nordic Capital is currently investing out of their eleventh fund, a €9B vehicle, and here make a substantial play into financial services software. Zafin provides a core platform to banks which enables quicker deployment of new products and modernization projects. Few industries are more closely regulated than banking and platforms like Zafin help distributed teams collaborate on complex projects in a manageable way. The Zafin management team has invested alongside Nordic in this deal — always a huge vote of confidence in a transaction. Kudos to all involved.

Strategic edtech deal sees SchoolStatus acquire SchoolNow

Overview: SchoolStatus provides a suite of communication and attendance solutions to K-12 schools across North America. The addition of SchoolNow and their team of 12, will greatly enhance the acquirer’s website support features with SchoolNow’s digital publishing platform combining ADA-compliant websites, mobile apps, social media, text, voice and email into an all-in-one system. Read more here.

Climb Comment: PSG backed SchoolStatus acquires a robust communication platform here to augment their existing school management platform. SchoolNow has a 24 year history of serving school districts and parents with a secure, multichannel, communications platform. K12 Edtech M&A often has a ‘land-grab’ element to it, with businesses competing for business among the approximately 13,000 school districts in the USA. Given the long sales cycles, committee-based buying, and benefit of on-the-ground sales, M&A can serve as an efficient customer acquisition channel, and buyers heavily weigh the opportunity to acquire relationships with large districts.

CTCI acquired by One Equity Partners backed Armis

Overview: CTCI, a cybersecurity company which provides AI powered software to detect threats and attacks before they occur, has been acquired by Armis. The deal will see CTCI’s tech integrated into Armis Centrix, a platform which sees, secures, protects and manages a company’s critical assets. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Interesting deal here out at the frontiers of cybersecurity. CTCI is a ‘threat hunting’ software company serving government organizations and large enterprise. CTCI deploys ‘honeypots’ - decoy digital assets that bad actors attempt to compromise, revealing critical intelligence about new developments in cyberattack methods. CTCI also monitors the Dark Web for pertinent ‘chatter’ which may suggest impending attacks. Armis themselves offer a very powerful cybersecurity suite, and being founded in 2020 they are an AI native platform, built to take on the most advanced security threats. Armis CT Nadir Izrael gives great detail on this acquisition here.

Large raise by Bending Spoons

A special mention this week to Bending Spoons, who’s acquisition of Mosaic Group was featured in a January edition of our newsletter. The Italian app studio just announced a major funding round led by Durable Capital Partners which sees them raise $155m at a $2.55b post-money valuation. The owner of popular apps such as Evernote and Meetup says it will use this cash injection to acquire more brands in the coming months, with current investors such as Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, NB Renaissance, NUO Capital and StarTIP participating in the round. Read more here.

The PE backed CEO in 2024

Excellent and short interview with multiple time PE backed CEO Adam Coffey here where he outlines what he views are best practices in managing relationship between CEO and financial sponsor.

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Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting.

All the best

Nick Cellura

Principal, Climb Advisors

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