Analysis of 15 Data & Analytics M&A and Fundraising Deals - September 16-20, 2024
TL;DR - Acqs by Descartes, Kalibrate, Euronext, Achilles; Funding for Flightkeys, Datamaran, Carbonfuture, Cherre, Akur8, wealth.com, Pinpoint Analytics; Potential M&A for REA, Featurespace, 23andMe.
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September 20 - Flightkeys GmbH, a flight management and optimization software player announced a significant investment by Insight Partners.
Flightkeys’ route modelling software is Data & Analytics to enable airlines to calculate their routes and schedules.
Flightkeys and its subsidiary companies Spacekeys and Skykeys develop and market software to optimize flight routes (Trajectory Optimization) and flight schedules in real time for the aviation industry as well as systems to assess GPS satellite signals and a cockpit application to optimize flight trajectories regarding costs and emissions.
Founded in April 2015, the company with its headquarters in Vienna employs 110 experts. Flightkeys has clients among U.S. and European carriers.
Insight Partners have been busy in Data & Analytics recently. Asymmetrix has recently covered:
September 12 - Mastercard bolsters threat intelligence capabilities with $2.65bn deal for Recorded Future.Insight acquired a controlling interest in Recorded Future in 2019, valuing the business at more than $780m. A 3.4x ROI in 5 years, generating $1.75m;
September 10 - Qualifyze, a supplier risk management technology provider to the Life Sciences industry, announced $54m in Series B funding from Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, HarbourVest Partners, H14 and Cherry Ventures.
Insight are also closing in on their latest $10bn fund.
Drake Star acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Flightkeys and its shareholders.
September 20 - Rupert Murdoch’s REA raises Rightmove bid to nearly £5.9bn - Financial Times.
Two weeks on from their initial bid, REA have sweetened their bid for Rightmove, increasing their valuation from £5.16bn to nearly £5.9bn.
We briefly covered the initial offer here:
We will continue to track this story.
September 19 - Sale of Featurespace to Visa for about £730m could be announced as soon as this week - Sky News.
Sky News first broke this story back on August 24.
IP Group, which owns a stake in Featurespace of just over 20%, and Chrysalis Investments, which is understood to own about 12%, ultimately stand to reap more than £220m from the sale of another leading UK-based technology company.
We await white smoke.
September 19 - Datamaran announced the completion of $33m in Series C financing from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.
Datamaran provides both the software and Data & Analytics to help companies comply with ESG standards. “Its database of 9,000 companies lets customers easily benchmark themselves, set targets, and achieve the best outcomes to drive efficiency and profitability.”
Datamaran’s previous £11.7m funding round in September 2022 was led by Fortive with participation from American Electric Power. According to the recent announcement, since its last funding round, Datamaran has more than doubled its subscription revenue.
September 19 - Carbonfuture, a provider of digital infrastructure for the carbon removal market, announced the close of its Series A funding round led by SIX and supported by follow-on investment from Carbonfuture's current investors.
Back in March we looked at four Carbon Credit Rating Agencies: Sylvera, BeZero, Calyx Global and Renoster, as a way in to the Renewable Energy / Energy Transition Data & Analytics sector.
In the post we discussed the centrality in the sector of a ton of carbon dioxide removed by a scheme actually being a ton of CO2 removed. All the parties - schemes, traders, offsetters, data providers, registries are all circling this same concept.
Carbonfuture is no different:
Founded in 2020, Carbonfuture was created to fill this gap by providing the essential infrastructure needed to build a trustworthy and transparent carbon removal market. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), six to ten gigatonnes of carbon removal will be required annually by 2050 to reach net zero. In order to scale to this level, the market must be built on data-driven transparency, independent verification, and accountability at every step of the carbon removal process.
Carbonfuture is somewhat a hybrid business - part exchange, part services and part Data & Analytics - which makes it a good fit with SIX.
We had a good look at SIX earlier this month.
Although this is not an acquisition, it does provide more colour about the type of data-driven deal SIX might do in future. Seemingly this investment was led by their Exchanges division rather than their Financial Information division.
Carbonfuture previously raised EUR5.5m in September 2022 from Carbon Removal Partners, Übermorgen Ventures, Kopa, tech4good venture capital fund, 4impact capital and Sustainable Future Ventures.
September 18 - Descartes acquires MyCarrierPortal for potential total of USD30m.
Screening is a high growth, must-have GRC area. KYC in Financial Services is huge. Employee screening the same. Ditto fraud prevention in ecommerce.
MyCarrierPortal does the same thing for the trucking industry.
MCP’s solutions help freight brokers and shippers quickly set up carrier requirements through an onboarding platform that gathers information on carriers and screens them for suitability to deliver loads/shipments based on the broker’s risk and compliance criteria. Truck carriers are screened for legitimacy, insurance compliance, and an acceptable safety record. Carriers that are onboarded to the platform are monitored on an ongoing basis to help ensure continued compliance. If a carrier falls out of compliance, the customer is notified to take appropriate action with that carrier.
Unusually for a deal of this size, deal terms were announced:
Descartes acquired MCP for up-front consideration of approximately $USD 24 million satisfied with cash on hand, plus potential performance-based consideration. The maximum amount payable under the all-cash performance-based earn-out is $USD 6 million, based on the combined business achieving revenue-based targets in each of the first two years post-acquisition. Any earn-out is expected to be paid in fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027.
September 17 - Real Estate Data & Analytics provider Cherre announces $30m Series C round led by HighSage Ventures.
Asymmetrix’s growing dataset contains 100+ Real Estate Data & Analytics providers, and we have repeatedly tracked deals in the sector. Green Street have been particularly active, hoovering up IJGlobal, part of the Delinian Group, and Locatus in the past few months.
Cherre raised $50m in April 2021 to drive its goal to create “the largest real estate knowledge graph in the world… [connecting] all disparate real estate data into a single source of truth”.
The mission continues.
This round was led by HighSage Ventures, and additional participants included Nuveen Real Estate, RXR (RADV), as well as current investors Trustbridge Partners, Glilot Capital Partners, Intel Capital, and Carthona Capital.
September 17 - Kalibrate announces acquisition of IMST Corp.
Kalibrate is an interesting and little-known Retail Data & Analytics provider focused on location analytics and fuel pricing. Long making little progress as a listed entity on the UK’s AIM market, Kalibrate’s fortune’s have turned since Hanover Investors took the business private in 2017 for £29m.
Since then Kalibrate have made a raft of acquisitions including Intalytics, eSite Analytics, Trade Area Systems and Kent Group. Current CEO Charles Wetzel joined Kalibrate through the eSite Analytics deal.
IMST Corp. specialises in site selection, analysis, and sales forecasting for convenience stores and fuel stations.
Given the length of time Hanover have held the business, the scale it has now reached, and its increased presence in the US, Asymmetrix imagines that the specialist mid-market Data & Analytics Private Equity firms will be knocking on the door in the hope of an impending transaction.
September 17 - Euronext acquires research and market data benchmarking provider Substantive Research.
European financial market infrastructure provider Euronext has made a bolt-on acquisition for its Advanced Data Services division, which generated EUR224.8m in revenues in 2023.
Euronext today announces that it has acquired 100% of Substantive Research, an industry-leading pioneer providing in-depth transparency on product and pricing comparison for investment research spend, market data and investment research content.
As the volume of market data increases, the need for Data & Analytics clients to control their costs and optimise spend increases too. The acquisition of TRG Screen by Vista from Pamlico Capital in October 2023 is part of the same trend.
Euronext helpfully points out the deal rationale in their announcement:
Euronext, through its subsidiary Commcise, offers cloud-based, fully-integrated commission management, research valuation, consumption tracking and payment solutions which are connected to over 1,000+ capital markets participants globally. Commcise brings the buy-side, sell-side and research providers together using technologies that are designed to service the needs of each participant, and its business has grown rapidly since joining Euronext in December 2018.
The combination of Commcise and Substantive Research offers multiple benefits for customers. Following the integration of Substantive Research, Commcise clients will be able to gain access to unique market benchmarks within the application. This will enable asset managers to demonstrate compliance with evolving regulation with the help of a single, integrated technology solution. Substantive Research customers will benefit from Euronext and Commcise’s scale, which will help Substantive Research to grow the universe of vendors that are benchmarked and also expand the variety of benchmarking products that it can offer to the buy- and sell-side.
Congratulations to Mike Carrodus and team, who founded Substantive Research in 2015.
NovitasFTCL advised Substantive Research.
September 17 - Kepler Cheuvreux, a European financial services company has become the majority shareholder of Trackinsight, a global reference platform for ETF selection and analysis.
Founded in 2016, 30-strong Trackinsight provides data and services focused on ETFs, including
A proprietary ETF database - with 11,000 ETFs analysed, 99.8% coverage of the ETF market in Europe and North America;
Services supporting the analysis and selection of ETFs for institutional investors, as well as assisting in the creation and optimisation of ETF portfolios;
A network of satellite websites developed in partnership with major stock exchanges and financial media, catering to the professional ETF investor community.
Trackinsight also provides the Financial Times with data for their ETF Hub.
Paris-based Kepler Cheuvreux provides research, execution and corporate finance. It also has an asset management business.
Kepler Cheuvreux is backed by Atlas Merchant Capital, the Private Equity vehicle of former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, Credit Agricole, UniCredit and ERES. Atlas acquired 19.7% of Kepler Cheuvreux, and ERES 8%, in June 2018.
September 17 - Wojcicki ‘committed’ to taking 23andMe private as board quits - Bloomberg.
The chaos at 23andMe continues. Fresh from CEO Anne Wojcicki indicating that she will consider outside offers for the business, on the heels of her failed attempt to put together her own acquisition vehicle, the company’s independent board members have quit.
After months of work, we have yet to receive from you a fully financed, fully diligenced, actionable proposal that is in the best interests of the non-affiliated shareholders. We believe the Special Committee and the Board have provided ample time for you to submit such a proposal. That we have not seen any notable progress over the last 5 months leads us to believe no such proposal is forthcoming. The Special Committee is therefore unwilling to consider further extensions, and the Board agrees with the Special Committee’s determination.
23andMe’s shares have fallen 63% this year - the company currently has a valuation of just $173m, down from a high of $6bn soon after its 2021 de-SPAC.
September 16 - Insurance Pricing provider Akur8 secures $120m in Series C funding from One Peak, Partners Group and Guidewire.
This massive round came just one year after Akur8 raised $25m, and six years after the platform was first commercialised. It will help to fund Akur8’s recent acquisition of Arius from Milliman, which added P&C reserving software to Akur8’s insurance pricing solution.
In addition, Akur8 are using the cash to grow their team globally, and to fund the creation of two new modules:
Optim, which enables insurers to determine the optimal insurance pricing strategy;
Deploy, Akur8’s new rating engine.
Perella Weinberg advised Akur8.
September 16 - wealth.com secures $30m Series A led by Google Ventures.
With just over 100 employees, wealth.com has grown fast since its $16m seed round in 2001. And they plan to use the money to drive growth in both their core wealth management vertical and, according to Citywire, other areas such as law firms serving the sector.
Wealth.com combines workflow software for wealth managers with historical data to enable calculation of tax and suggest optimisation strategies.
Citi Ventures, Outpost Ventures (an investment platform of Neuberger Berman), 53 Stations (supported by The Pritzker Organization) and Firebolt Ventures also participated.
The Wealth Management Data & Analytics sector has been active this year. We mentioned TA Associates and Montagu’s investment in Harvest last month:
and looked at Pamlico Capital-backed Datos Insights’ acquisition of Wise Insights back in June:
September 16 - Achilles to acquire GoSupply to strengthen presence in Iberia and expand global supply chain solutions.
Bridgepoint-backed Supply Chain & Risk Management Software, Services and Data & Analytics platform Achilles has acquired Spanish supply chain management company GoSupply. Terms were not disclosed.
This is the first time Asymmetrix has written about Achilles, a giant in the supply chain risk management sector. The business deserves closer examination in due course. Bridgepoint acquired Achilles in September 2021 from Hg.
Achilles has been quiet from an M&A perspective since Bridgepoint’s investment. Perhaps this deal will spark a resurgence in their acquisition strategy.
GoSupply was advised by Arcano.
September 16 - AI-powered construction data platform, PinPoint Analytics secured $3.2m investment led by HG Ventures.
Anecdotal evidence from Asymmetrix conversations suggests a surge of interest in Construction Data & Analytics from financial sponsors, driven by the opportunity to modernise a sector that has lagged behind in the use of technology.
Four-year-old PinPoint Analytics, which focuses on providing Data & Analytics to improve the road construction industry’s bidding and estimating process, sits in an interesting part of the market. There are a range of providers focused on procurement workflows, from large incumbents like Fortive-owned Gordian to start-ups like PinPoint.
The funding round was led by HG Ventures, the corporate venture arm of The Heritage Group, and Compose VC participated.
Great post as usual