Climb's M&A Weekly: Deals by Akamai, Reveal and Docusign

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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Akamai to acquire cybersecurity startup Noname Security for $450M

Overview: Cloud security company Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) is buying Noname Security, a San Jose based startup specializing in API security. The integration of Noname’s solutions will allow Akamai to extend the protection they can offer their clients across all API traffic locations, with the acquisition coming at a noticeable discount to the $1B Noname was valued at during its last private fundraise in December 2021. This deal is expected to add $20M in revenue for the acquirer in 2024, with Noname’s team of over 200 employees joining post close. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Steep discount compared to the froth of 2021 markets but still a healthy >15x arr multiple here for Noname, and a win for early investors. Akamai offers a comprehensive cloud computing platform with robust built-in API & security capabilities and here adds cybersecurity protection for APIs. APIs are high risk areas in system infrastructure — anywhere there is an ‘opening’ in a system the threat of attack is higher. Strategic for Akamai to offer secured APIs ‘out of the box’.

Reveal adds Onna Technologies to help clients manage unstructured data

Overview: Reveal, provider of an AI powered eDiscovery, review and investigations platform, is acquiring Onna Technologies. The New York based company’s software allows for data gathering, deep analysis and management, with their integration into Reveal’s platform set to help corporate legal teams reduce time between review-to-insight, resulting in lower costs and legal risks for clients. Read more here.

Climb Comment: More activity in legal tech & another win for startups solving the challenges of working with unstructured data. As AI gets more capable & software is able to crawl & contextualize vast repositories at scale the AI flywheel is tightened. This is exactly the case here, with Reveal, a leading provider of eDiscovery solutions, acquiring Onna, who specialize in collating and ingesting varied and often messy sources of data relevant to legal cases.

Lexion bought by Docusign to augment their intelligent agreement management (IAM) platform

Overview: Lexion and their AI-powered agreement management software, has been acquired by Docusign (NASDAQ: DOCU) for $165M to cement the acquirer’s position as a leader in this space. Lexion’s software helps automate the contract process with accelerated drafting, negotiation, and review of agreements, whilst also making it easier to extract vital information from these agreements. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Another deal falling under the umbrella of legaltech as Docusign aims to expand beyond it’s role as the eponymous e-signature platform. Makes sense - if Docusign is where contracts end up in an organization then adding capabilities around contract review and redline negotiation is a tremendous value & efficiency add. No telling whether this will help get NDAs signed any faster.

Also worth noting that Docusign themselves are reportedly exploring sale to private equity, more HERE.

Post Capital Partners backed Ironmark acquires Deliver Media and L&D Mail Masters

Overview: Full service marketing and communications firm Ironmark has made a double acquisition with the goal of simplifying the difficulty associated with market campaign creation and management. Tampa based Deliver Media helps create targeted, data-driven campaigns for franchise and multi-unit businesses using predictive analytics and machine learning, whilst L&D Mail Masters is a direct mail firm that offers solutions for direct marketing needs from campaign design to implementation. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Strong play here for Ironmark acquiring a direct mail firm & a more strategic multichannel campaign agency. We see this often in the agency ecosystem - a blending of tactical & strategic capabilities & acquirers using M&A to solve time to execution for both. Often it’s the case of a more strategy focused agency acquiring fulfillment resources, or a larger ‘lower-tech’ shop buying a core strategic consultancy, and here we see a scaled player (Ironmark has made 16 acquisitions over the past 20 years) acquiring both in one shot. Kudos to all.

Echo360 boost their educational platform by acquiring Inkling

Overview: Echo360 provides a SaaS platform for interactive video learning management, content, engagement and assessment which can be used by both instructors and learners to create, record and view content, and give and receive feedback. This deal sees them add Inkling and their set of digital training and development solutions, which include content authoring tools, videos, simulations and real time analytics. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Echo is a leading provider of learning & assessment solutions to more than 1200 higher education institutions worldwide as well as large enterprises. They claim the title of most widely-used test generator for higher ed & business use and also offer a suite of curriculum development tools and video sharing modules. Here they acquire Inkling, a true mobile-first LMS and add advanced authoring tools & analytics and a user-friendly mobile interface. For students & frontline workers alike user engagement goes up substantially when learners are able to access coursework and assessments via mobile login vs strictly desktop.

Article of the Week

Berkshire Hathaway held their annual meeting last week, always a major event for the investing community. Notably absent this year was Charlie Munger, but Warren Buffett still got on stage and provided his usual insights, wisdom, & commentary. Buffett often serves as an excellent voice of caution around euphoria in markets and his views on AI are no different - with him saying last week that scams around AI may represent the ‘growth industry of all time.’

Read more here.

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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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