Climb's M&A Weekly: Deals by Banyan, Impel and Vitec

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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Banyan Software announces acquisition of Viostream from Atlasview Equity Partners and Bloom Equity Partners

Overview: Enterprise software buyer Banyan has made Viostream the latest addition to their portfolio. The Australian company provides a video content and management platform to government and corporations, that allows users to group, organize and tag videos whilst also ensuring complete enterprise security. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Big congrats to both parties here with Banyan expanding their holdings in the ANZ market and Atlasview/Bloom notching an exit off their 2021 investment. Viostream is the leading player for secured and large scale on-demand/live video distribution in the Australian market and Banyan will likely use their global sales & marketing engine to focus on scaling into other geos.

Silversmith backed Impel acquires Outsell for over $100M

Overview: Impel, a provider of customer lifecycle management software to the automotive industry, is acquiring Outsell in a deal valued at over $100M. By combining Outsell’s AI-driven sales and marketing platform with their current SaaS solutions, Impel is aiming to establish the auto industry’s first end-to-end AI sales and marketing automation platform. This announcement also marks Impel’s 3rd acquisition since 2021 following on from deals for Pulsar AI and CarLabs.ai. Impel raised $104M in growth equity in a round led by Silversmith last year. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Impel continuing to gain ground in the automotive space with a sizable deal for Outsell, bringing the combined platform to 8,000 dealerships served in 51 countries. Outsell offers full-cycle targeting — identifying website visitors to turn them into shoppers, targeted campaigns to existing customers to fill service center vacancies or market a specific vehicle, and comprehensive customer tracking across multi-location dealer groups. The sales motion into auto dealerships is challenging and lends itself to companies offering a platform style solution and with this deal + likely continued M&A Impel is well-positioned to take majority market share.

Vertical software buyer Vitec secures a majority stake in Taxiteknik

Overview: Vitec Software Group have acquired a majority of Taxiteknik, with the founders set to continue controlling operations. The Swedish company offers a set of solutions to help taxi companies run their business mainly through their Traffic Management, DriverApp and BookingApp products. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Vitec is a leading vertical software acquirer in the Nordic region and here closes a deal that falls right in their sweet spot of closely held niche businesses. Taxiteknik does around 20 million SEK ( ~$1.8m) in revenue and 6 employees will join the Vitec team. The deal is immediately accretive to Vitec on an EPS basis. Interesting to study the Vitec model vs Constellation & the other VSI players as Vitec tend to take more of a focus on stability vs turnaround situations and are content to remain locally focused. Most of the global aggregators like to acquire in Scandinavia but on deals this size it is likely that local expertise, cultural fit, and localized cost synergies put Vitec in a more competitive position vs foreign buyers. Kudos to all.

KKR backed mdf commerce acquires EcoInteractive from ASG

Overview: KKR taking mdf commerce private made a March edition of our newsletter (link), and the PE giant is wasting no time growing the company further. This deal sees them add EcoInteractive and their set of SaaS solutions for helping transportation, environmental and local government agencies in the U.S manage their critical infrastructure. Given mdf already delivers digital commerce solutions to the largest network of public agency buyers in North America, this deal will add significant value to their set of GovTech software as public bodies continue to look for digital efficiencies across their operations. Read more here.

Climb Comment: ASG acquired EcoInteractive in 2017 and achieved significant growth and product improvement over that period. Tons of cross-sell potential on this deal with both parties having strong ties into government agencies & EcoInteractive managing critical infrastructure in 25 US states. Govtech remains active as scaled investors seek end markets with stable dynamics and growing budgets.

UpSwell buys Dental Marketing to expand their presence in that vertical

Overview: UpSwell offers data-driven direct response marketing solutions to small and medium sized businesses. This deal sees them specifically target the dental industry, with the aptly named Dental Marketing providing direct mail and related marketing services that are tailored to the needs of dental practices across the US. Read more here.

Climb Comment: UpSwell offers comprehensive marketing solutions to local businesses and here adds both functional strengths around direct mail and expanded presence in the dental vertical. Dental Marketing gains access to turnkey digital marketing solutions for their current clients and expects to realize value there. Climb has been paying attention to the dental marketing space after recently advising Onfolio on their acquisition of DDSRank - intros to other companies in the space are most welcome.

Presentation of the week

We enjoyed Avenir Capital’s review of software, particularly the SAAS market, today. Many takeaways including their observation that what management teams are calling “tough macro” is actually “new normal”. It’s worth a read 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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