Analysis of 8 Data & Analytics M&A and Fundraising Deals - September 30-October 5, 2024
TL;DR - Acquisitions for Experian, Internet Brands, TPG, Cendyn; Funding for Vieu, BMLL; Potential activity in Compare the Market; the end of the Rightmove/REA saga.
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October 4 - Experian has agreed to acquire ClearSale S.A., a digital fraud prevention provider in Brazil for up to $350m.
Credit data behemoth Experian is acquiring one of South America’s largest Data & Analytics providers, listed ClearSale. Quoting from the press release:
ClearSale is a leading provider of digital fraud prevention solutions in Brazil. ClearSale's premier offer is an end-to-end platform solution which combines data, analytics and decisioning using artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect fraud in card-not-present transactions. ClearSale's over 7,400 active clients include some of the largest online retailers, banks and telecommunications companies in Brazil.
Leveraging its proprietary historical database, ClearSale enables online retailers to swiftly and accurately verify consumer identities during transactions, leading to increased automated approvals while simultaneously enhancing fraud detection and prevention.
Serasa Experian has established a leading position in ID&F [ID and Fraud], primarily helping clients to prevent fraud when they authenticate and onboard their customers through digital channels. Serasa Experian also increasingly provides ID&F solutions through a combined sale across credit analytics and fraud risk management.
ClearSale is highly complementary and synergistic to Serasa Experian's existing ID&F business. By combining ClearSale's scaled position with Serasa Experian's existing capabilities, we will deliver a more comprehensive and superior experience to clients. We expect the combination to unlock new use cases and widen the market opportunity still further, positioning Serasa Experian strongly to address this attractive growth market.
ClearSale had revenues of roughly $92m last year and went public back in 2021.
Experian have made many identity and fraud acquisitions in recent years, most recently NeuroID in August this year. The Credit Data & Analytics and GRC sectors continue to collide.
October 5 - Compare the Market investor CPPIB plots sale of stake in £4.5bn price comparison site - Sky News.
Asymmetrix is on the fence about whether to include this asset as Data & Analytics. While we mull it over, go ahead and read the news for yourself.
CPPIB owns 30% of Compare the Market.
October 3 - Thomson Reuters, a global content and technology company, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its FindLaw business to Internet Brands for an undisclosed amount.
KKR- and Warburg Pincus-backed Internet Brands is a near perfect home for FindLaw:
Internet Brands specialises in hybrid consumer internet/Data & Analytics businesses like FindLaw;
Internet Brands already own properties in the Legal space.
Internet Brands is a fully integrated online media and software services company focused on four high-value vertical categories: Health, Automotive, Legal, and Home/Travel. The company's properties and platforms include the WebMD, Medscape, and Henry Schein ONE networks, which are the global leaders in their markets; Nolo, Avvo, and Martindale, which form the largest consumer information provider in the legal market; and CarsDirect, Fodor's Travel, and many others which are leaders in their key vertical markets.
We talked about Internet Brands back in May when we covered Chambers and Partners:
The joint press release helpfully explains the deal rationale:
This transaction will allow both Thomson Reuters and Internet Brands to concentrate on their strategic priorities, ensuring customers continue to receive top-tier service and support from FindLaw.
Centerview Partners LLC served as financial advisor to Thomson Reuters.
October 3 - B2B Sales AI platform Vieu raises $11m in seed funding led by Trilogy Equity Partners with participation from Incubate Fund and Vela Partners.
RevOps and Go-to-Market Data & Analytics and workflow solutions is a hot space. Asymmetrix has nearly 100 companies in this sector in our database and add more each week.
Vieu is definitely on to something - hand-cranking sales with large teams of BDRs, hard to reconcile datasets and spray-and-pray tactics is expensive and inefficient.
Platforms like Vieu aim to combine Data & Analytics about hiring, networks and companies to enable sales teams to identify and execute on high quality leads.
We will follow Vieu and their competitors with interest.
October 2 - Market Data & Analytics provider BMLL closed a $21m funding round led by Optiver, alongside FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures, IQ Capital’s Growth Fund, CTC Venture Capital and Snowflake Ventures.
BMLL provides harmonised, historical Level 3, 2 and 1 Data and Analytics across global equity, ETFs and futures markets.
Level I quotes provide basic price data for a stock, including the best bid and ask price + size on each side';
Level II quotes provide more information than level I quotes by adding market depth. Level II typically shows up to the 5-10 best bid and offer prices;
Level III quotes add greater market depth by providing up to 20 of the best bid and ask prices. Users, primarily brokers and market makers, can also input data directly.
This data is highly valuable to quant traders looking for the best quality information to feed their models. It’s no coincidence therefore that BMLL client and market maker Optiver led the round, and now has board seats.
BMLL has been through multiple funding rounds since they were founded in 2014:
BMLL secured $26 million in its Series B funding round in Q4 2022, led by Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund to fuel further product and geographic expansion. Snowflake Ventures joined the investment round in September 2023.
Jefferies LLC acted as financial advisor and Taylor Wessing LLP acted as legal advisor to BMLL in connection with this transaction. Mills & Reeve LLP acted as legal advisor to FactSet and IQ Capital.
October 1 - Surescripts, a US health information network, announced that TPG, a global alternative asset management firm, will join the Surescripts ownership group as a majority investor.
News of this process leaked back in April this year. According to Business Insider back then:
Surescripts is jointly owned: Rival pharmacy benefit managers CVS Health and Cigna-owned Express Scripts own 50%, while trade groups including the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the National Community Pharmacists Association own the other half.
This unusual ownership structure could make a sale complicated because the owners have different priorities, according to one of the people familiar with the deal and a former Surescripts executive.
Surescripts is likely looking for a private-equity buyer because it wants to maintain neutrality for its PBM and pharmacy owners, the former Surescripts executive said. A strategic buyer — a big health insurer with a PBM, for example — might tip the scales toward the PBM owners at the cost of the pharmacies, the former executive said.
Sure enough, TPG have acquired a majority stake in the business for an estimated $1.8bn - or 28x EBITDA - according to Axios.
Founded in 2001, Surescripts provides e-prescription services - enabling the electronic transmission of prescriptions between health care organizations and pharmacies - as well as general health information exchange of medical records.
As a result it is sitting on a treasure trove of data on prescriptions, patient population and formularies.
Freed from their prior ownership structure it seems likely that Surescripts will look for potential healthcare Data & Analytics targets. We will watch their activity with interest.
There are a lot of deals going on in the electronic health record space currently. It is unclear whether TPG are considering combining Surescripts with one of the other assets currently in market. Asymmetrix suspects that there may be potential anti-trust issues.
Competitor Netsmart was rumoured back in January to be exploring a sale:
The private equity owners of Netsmart Technologies are exploring a sale of the U.S. healthcare software firm that they hope will value it at more than $5 billion, including debt, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Overland Park, Kansas-based company, which is owned by GI Partners and TA Associates, is working with investment banks Goldman Sachs Group and William Blair to launch a sale process in the coming weeks, the sources said.
Also, the Financial Times reported in August that Roche, who paid $1.9bn for Flatiron Health in 2018, are considering selling the business. Citi are advising Roche.
In addition, listed business Veradigm announced back in May that they would “explore strategic alternatives”.
Surescripts was advised by TripleTree and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. TPG Capital is advised by Deutsche Bank, Evercore, JP Morgan and Kirkland & Ellis.
October 1 - Cendyn, a cloud-based hospitality technology provider, has acquired hotel meetings and events data specialist Knowland, for an undisclosed amount.
Since Accel-KKR invested in hotel CRM and hotel sales software provider Cendyn in June 2019, the business has been on an acquisitions spree:
October 2023 - PUSHTech - hotel CRM and marketing automation;
August 2023 - WIHP - hotel metasearch services and technology;
August 2022 - digitalhotelier - hotel marketing and analytics platform;
November 2021 - Pegasus - revenue and distribution solutions;
February 2021 - NextGuest - CRM and Digital Marketing services;
August 2019 - The Rainmaker Group - revenue and profit optimization platform.
Last week they made their first Data & Analytics acquisition, bolting on Knowland.
Arlington, VA-based Knowland provides a historical database of events on meetings and events to hotels and venues to enable them to identify and capitalise on event-driven sales and marketing opportunities.
Shifting to providing proprietary data represents a strategic development for Cendyn - as the above transactions show, previously they had focused on providing a platform for hotels to analyse and monetise their own data.
Cendyn also used the press release as an opportunity to announce they had received backing from Haveli Investments.
The deal provides an exit for private equity firm Serent Capital. Serent, which has a strong track record in the Hospitality sector, backed Knowland in 2013.
Larry Phillips at Stifel acted as a financial advisor to Knowland and Serent Capital in the transaction.
September 30 - Rupert Murdoch’s REA Group withdraws possible offer for Rightmove.
The saga is over. Rightmove have rebuffed REA’s approaches, including their final £6.2bn bid.
Although consolidation in the highly fragmented residential property search market will continue, it will not be between these two entities for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, REA Group announced a minority investment in IMMERSIV, a 3D visualisation platform designed specifically to support buying and selling off the plan properties. The deal is reminiscent (albeit this is not a full takeover) of the recent acquisition of Matterport by CoStar, which we covered back in April.
While we are on the subject of CoStar, if you are a Data & Analytics nerd then the latest The Synopsis podcast from is a must.
At over three hours (!) long it is not for the fainthearted but it provides an incredibly comprehensive overview of the Real Estate Data & Analytics giant.