On 5 April 2016, more than 60 Founders and CEOs of the UK’s leading tech companies attended Kennet Partner’s London technology event. The event, chaired by Hillel Zidel from Kennet Partners, aimed to provide helpful insights on navigating companies through phases of growth upwards to $100 million plus in revenues to Founders/CEOs.
Chris Havemann and Murray Hennessy, both of whom have significant experience in scaling tech companies and led businesses at the $100 million plus revenue level, shared key lessons from their recent journeys. Chris Havemann was the Founder and CEO of Research Now (acquired by e-Rewards for $133 million), former CEO of RatedPeople.com, and is currently a Non-Executive Director at Kennet backed RealityMine and Homeserve plc. Murray Hennessy was the former CEO of trainline.com and is currently Chairman of Abcam plc, TGI Fridays and Kennet backed Receipt Bank.
Here are some of the insights shared from the event.
London, UK -- February 2 2016 Receipt Bank, the leading bookkeeping automation software company, announces today that it has raised $10 million in growth capital from Kennet Partners, a leading international growth equity firm that invests in successful high-growth companies in Europe and North America, supporting entrepreneurial technology businesses with expansion capital.
Award-winning Receipt Bank provides automation to accounting and bookkeeping firms and their small business clients. Launched in February 2011, Receipt Bank has grown rapidly as the leading accounting firms around the world have adopted its software. Today Receipt Bank is used by thousands of accounting firms to power the bookkeeping of tens of thousands of small businesses and, on their behalf, processes millions of transactions each month. The company now has five offices on three continents including Washington DC, Sydney & London. Receipt Bank was also recently identified by TechCity’s Upscale programme as one of the UK’s 30 finest fast growth technology companies.
“Automation enables the best accounting firms to reduce their costs, save time and increase the speed and quality of their service. We are incredibly proud to be working with so many great firms who are redefining small business accounting and delighted to be partnering with such an experienced growth investor as Kennet. With this investment we will be able to further improve our industry leading technology and to help even more firms enhance their bookkeeping processes.” Alexis Prenn, CEO of Receipt Bank
Automation has been widely signalled to have the potential to disrupt many industries including accounting. Receipt Bank has developed a range of proprietary technologies including data extraction from receipts, bills and invoices to make the power of automation available to accountants and bookkeepers. These technologies allow firms to complete bookkeeping tasks faster and for less cost.
“Automation is clearly a big trend. Receipt Bank has led the field in bringing automation to small business accounting and bookkeeping and we are very excited to be supporting the company on its journey.” Hillel Zidel, Managing Director of Kennet Partners
Capital SCF served as financial advisor and Cooley (UK) LLP served as legal advisor to Receipt Bank during this financing.
Manchester, UK -- December 14 2015 RealityMine, a leading global provider of mobile market research technologies and consumer analytics, announced today it has received a $17.25 million growth equity investment led by Kennet Partners, a leading international growth equity firm that invests in successful, high-growth companies in Europe and North America.
GP Bullhound, a leading technology investment bank, acted as exclusive financial adviser to RealityMine. The round of funding was led by Kennet Partners and included existing investors GP Bullhound Sidecar III LP, GMCA and a number of other high profile private investors.
Weightmans LLP served as legal advisor to RealityMine during the funding round.
The investment will be used by RealityMine to further technology advancements in the areas of mobile and cross-platform measurement, as well as behavioral analytics. In addition, RealityMine will be opening additional markets worldwide and expanding its services to new industry verticals.
“2015 has been an incredibly successful year with consistent 200% year over year growth, the establishment of several new important client partnerships, the opening of additional offices worldwide and a myriad of industry recognitions and awards,” says Garry Partington, RealityMine CEO. “The ability to close the year with not only the tangible investment that this funding brings, but also the support and confidence of our investors, places us in an optimal position to surpass these achievements in 2016.”
“RealityMine has been able to achieve significant growth in a capital efficient manner in its short history as a company,” says Hillel Zidel, Partner at Kennet Partners. “By providing clients with single-sourced consumer passive metering and contextual data, its technology offers something unique in the market. We are very excited to be partnering with the company as it enters its next phase of growth and seeks to build on its already impressive customer base.”
“We have been involved with RealityMine since 2013, and have been lucky enough to witness RealityMine develop a product and service that has become integral to marketers worldwide to increase the effectiveness of their advertising spend,” says Hugh Campbell, Managing Partner of GP Bullhound. “As more connected devices come online it is clear that brands and marketing agencies will put enormous value on the kind of data and insights RealityMine generates to make higher ROI on their multi-million pound marketing, programming and product decisions. The business has achieved great success in such a short period of time by providing customers with state of the art technology and great customer support. We expect that its rapid growth will continue for many years to come.”
RealityMine uniquely combines proprietary passive behavioral metering technologies on mobile devices, tablets, PCs, and even home routers with active eDiary and other in-the-moment survey tools to quantify the context of consumers’ daily lives and their media consumption behaviors.
RealityMine’s TouchPoints research and Technology is now available in over 20 markets and is used by major media agencies, creative agencies, market research agencies and media owners for granular day in the life insights, cross-media audience flows and to understand the complex consumer journey along the path to purchase. The RealityMine data is unique in its ability to identify the role moods and emotions play in ad receptivity and motivation to purchase.
As of December 2015, RealityMine is capturing data from more than 50,000 people representing more than 350,000 days of contextual and behavioral data and generating nearly 1,000,000,000 behavioral datapoints per year. This will provide marketers with one of the richest behavioral and contextual databases available.
Pleasanton, California -- September 15 2015 ThinkHR, the leading HR solutions company that provides expert HR-related advice and training to employers, today announced that it has secured additional funding to fuel its growth and leadership. Kennet Partners, a leading international growth equity firm that invests in companies across North America and Europe, made the $12 million investment in ThinkHR.
The additional funding will be used to further accelerate ThinkHR’s aggressive product, technology and market development initiatives. ThinkHR will continue to expand its rapidly growing footprint in the multi-billion-dollar market for expert answers, information and training solutions that enable employers to comply effectively and efficiently with today’s increasingly complex HR regulatory requirements. ThinkHR has more than 650 partners and some 89,000 employers relying on its proven expertise and cloud-based technology solutions.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with a top-tier growth equity firm like Kennet as we create the breakthrough products and support infrastructure that help our insurance brokerage and payroll partners to succeed in the new benefits economy,” said Peter Yozzo, founder and CEO of ThinkHR. “This additional funding allows us to create powerful new tools and services that help our partners to enhance and expand the value they deliver to clients every day. That added value plays a key role in helping our partners to attract new business and strengthen existing client relationships.”
The new funding also advances ThinkHR’s mission to empower millions of employers and HR professionals to ensure compliance and be more efficient, productive and successful, Yozzo added.
“Kennet is all about helping successful entrepreneurial technology companies take the next big jump in growth, and that is exactly why we are investing in ThinkHR,” said Eric Filipek, managing director of Kennet Partners. “We believe ThinkHR has strong growth potential based on the opportunity to capture a significant and growing share of the market for providing HR solutions through 32,000-plus service provider channel partners. Equally important, ThinkHR is well positioned to engage the broader market of 2.15 million employers with its best-in-class HR answers and cloud-based technology platform.”
Before this new $12 million investment, ThinkHR had been financed through angel funding, venture debt and revenue from ongoing operations.
ThinkHR sells its HR-related products and services through channel partners that include insurance brokerage firms and payroll services providers. These partners then provide ThinkHR’s solutions to their clients, enabling them to comply efficiently and quickly with today’s increasingly complex regulatory and legal requirements, such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health care reform regulations.
To view the original version on ThinkHR, visit here.
Salt Lake City, Utah — 11 March 2015 TreeHouse Interactive™, the technology leader in SaaS-based partner relationship management (PRM), announced today that Kennet Partners and co-investor Joe Wang have acquired majority ownership of the software company. Wang, who has already made his mark in the Utah high-tech community as president and CEO of local software powerhouse LANDesk Software, will lead the fast-growing PRM market leader as the new chairman and CEO. The company's sole shareholders Craig Flynn and Erich Flynn will remain with the company and collaborate with Wang in leadership positions in development and sales. Craig Flynn will continue to drive product engineering and innovation in his role as executive vice president of engineering. Erich Flynn will expand and lead the company's sales efforts as chief revenue officer.
Utah tech companies have become a hot-bed for venture capital investments over the last few years with several companies including InsideSales.com, Domo, AtTask, Jive and more accepting investment deals to expand. In fact, Utah ranks 7th nationally in venture capital funding for 2014. According to the PwC/NVCA MoneyTree Report, Utah companies raised over $800 million in venture capital funding in 2014. That beats $316.2 million raised in 2013. The recent investment in TreeHouse is largely based on the growth that is anticipated in the PRM technology space.
In the 2014 Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM Sales*, PRM (partner relationship management), along with technologies such as lead management and eCommerce SaaS, is on the slope of enlightenment as an early mainstream maturity level that is expected to reach mainstream adoption from less than two years for lead management and eCommerce SaaS, to somewhere in the next two to five years for PRM. According to the report, PRM continues to gain momentum as companies work to optimize sales and marketing activities across multiple channels, and rely on third parties to expand their market presence.
In January, TreeHouse reported that the company's total overall 2014 revenue grew 49 percent over 2013. The number of partners supported by Reseller View™ PRM surpassed the previous all-time high, reaching more than 160,000 worldwide at the end of 2014. TreeHouse expects the number of partners supported by its robust PRM solution to nearly double in 2015. The company's PRM platform supports global partner networks for industry-leading enterprises including Xerox, Rackspace, Sungard AS, SGI, Magento, National Instruments, CommVault and Quantum. Reseller View was identified as a leader in Forrester Research Inc.'s The Forrester Wave™: Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Platforms report, and cited for more native functionality, superior user interfaces and usability than competing solutions.
Reseller View is the most comprehensive PRM solution available and was built from the ground up by channel experts to provide vendors with a scalable platform to deliver vendor partner sales forces with the feature rich tools needed to successfully sell, service and support their products. Functionality includes, but is not limited to:
- Deal Registration
- Lead Distribution
- Partner Portal Website Branded to Corporate Look and Feel
- Automated MDF/Co-op Management
- Partner Locator
- Automated Training and Certification Program
- Through Partner Marketing Enablement and Automation
- Integrated To Partner Marketing Engine
- Full Service Implementation (No Client Resource Required)
- Automated Partner On-boarding Process
- Automated Contract Management
- Secure Partner Portal Environment
- Out of the Box CRM Integration
- Advanced Multi-Level Document Management
- And much more...
We are seeing more business generated by the channel than ever before, said Darren Bibby, program vice president, Channels and Alliances Research at IDC. PRM technology continues to gain market traction with the growing need for manufacturers to provide partners with holistic technology solutions that automate and enable processes like deal registration, lead distribution and MDF.
Kennet is a leading growth equity investor with $700 million under management and a long track record of success. We focus on bootstrapped companies that have a proven market opportunity, product and growth potential. We were impressed with the growth and success TreeHouse Interactive has achieved in the PRM space. With more financial resources and leadership talent we are confident we can take them to the next level, said Eric Filipek, managing director of Kennet. Our investment demonstrates the confidence we have in TreeHouse's PRM solution, the existing team and in its new CEO Joe Wang, who will bring with him a tremendous track record of success. In addition to Eric Filipek, Kennet managing director Javier Rojas will also join TreeHouse's board of directors.
Mr. Wang's record includes growing businesses and generating tremendous returns during his 25 years in high technology. As CEO at WatchGuard Technologies, he successfully turned around the revenue declining and money-losing business, creating a profitable and growing company with vastly improved technology and market position. Prior to joining WatchGuard, Wang was president and CEO of LANDesk Software, an Intel spin-off, where he grew the company by 150 percent in four years. He sold LANDesk Software in 2007, generating 11x return for investors. Prior to LANDesk, Wang was founder and CEO of 20/20 Software. He successfully grew the company and then sold to Symantec, generating 10x return for his investors.
Utah has developed into a hotbed of SaaS technology, and I'm excited to be back in this dynamic market, said Joe Wang, chairman and CEO of TreeHouse Interactive. My investment in TreeHouse demonstrates my strong belief that Reseller View PRM is by far the best PRM technology available today, backed by a powerful team of people. I look forward to strengthening our technology leadership position in the PRM market and expanding the company worldwide.
Our Founder, Craig, and I vetted several investment firms over many months for possible investment, said Erich Flynn, chief revenue officer of TreeHouse Interactive. Kennet Partners and Joe Wang have a proven track record growing successful businesses. We are looking forward to using this investment and adding resources to accelerate sales, product roadmap, and growth objectives while continuing to deliver the innovative technology and support our existing clients have come to expect.
*Gartner Report: Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2014, Robert P. Desisto, July 16, 2014
About Kennet Partners
Kennet is a leading international growth equity firm that invests in companies in Europe and North America. Kennet supports entrepreneurial technology businesses with expansion capital to accelerate growth and build exceptional shareholder value. Kennet is an experienced investor with approximately $700 million in funds under management. For more information: www.kennet.com. Kennet Partners Limited is authorized and regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority.
About TreeHouse Interactive
TreeHouse Interactive delivers leading SaaS-based partner relationship management (PRM) and marketing automation platform (MAP) solutions to companies that want to get better return on investment from their partner networks and marketing efforts. Reseller View is the most complete PRM in the industry while Marketing View has been innovating marketing automation since 1998. For more information, visit www.treehousei.com or call 801.576.8428.
Washington -- 20 March 2015 /PRNewswire/ Today Blackboard Inc. announced that it has finalized its acquisition of Schoolwires, one of the leading educational website, hosting and content management providers to K-12 schools and districts. With the close of this acquisition, Blackboard continues to demonstrate its commitment to be the leading K-12 provider of school websites and parent notification solutions.
Today's news marks the conclusion of Blackboard's initial agreement to acquire the Pennsylvania-based company with nearly 200 employees. The addition of Schoolwires' industry leading solutions and services represents a major component of Blackboard's renewed K-12 strategy by enhancing its parent and community engagement solutions and expanding its partner ecosystem.
"One of our main goals has been to pick the best products in the markets to meet the evolving and expanding needs of our community," said Mychal Frost, public information officer at Clover School District and vice president of the South Carolina chapter of the National School Public Relations Association (SC/NSPRA). "All of the products we have chosen are now in the Blackboard solution set, including Blackboard's notification tools, the ParentLink mobile app and now Schoolwires' website solution. It is clear that whether they are developing new technology, acquiring other providers or partnering with industry leaders, Blackboard is trying to add value to their portfolio, and we appreciate that."
"To truly make our mission of reimagining education a reality, we have to focus on the full learning lifecycle, which begins in K-12," said Jay Bhatt, CEO of Blackboard. "Schoolwires has created some of the most innovative products, solutions and services that improve K-12 communications and community engagement. Effective communication is the gateway to delivering new learning models that improve teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. By adding Schoolwires to the Blackboard portfolio, we are uniquely positioned to help district leadership transition K-12 schools to these new models with the participation and support of their communities."
"Today's news marks another great milestone for Schoolwires," said Christiane Crawford, president and CEO of Schoolwires. "We are excited to join the Blackboard team, merging two industry-leading organizations to continue our pursuit of helping students be more successful, improving the educational experience in K-12, and helping to shape the future of this industry."
"We couldn't be more delighted with this outcome," said Edward S. Marflak, chairman and founder of Schoolwires. "It's a great situation for our customers, our employees and the entire K-12 marketplace as Blackboard expands its strong portfolio of solutions for teaching, learning and engagement."
Schoolwires provides a suite of technology products and related services to more than 11 million users and 1,700 districts and educational entities in the U.S. and China. Its solutions include an integrated website and content management system, a social learning and networking system, a family of mobile applications and an enterprise technology platform.
For more information about Blackboard, please visit www.blackboard.com or follow @Blackboard on Twitter.
About Blackboard Inc.
Blackboard is the world's leading education technology company. We challenge conventional thinking and advance new models of learning in order to reimagine education and make it more accessible, engaging and relevant to the modern day learner and the institutions that serve them. In partnership with our customers and partners in higher education and K-12 as well as corporations and government agencies around the world, our mission is to help every learner achieve their full potential by inspiring a passion for lifelong learning. For more information about Blackboard, follow us on Twitter @Blackboard.
Any statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects for Blackboard represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various important factors. The Company anticipates that subsequent events and developments will cause the Company's views to change. However, while the Company may elect to update these statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so.
To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit here.
SOURCE Blackboard Inc.