Dear Clients and Friends:
As our Thanksgiving holiday approaches, we take the opportunity to say thank you for one of the best years we have had in our nearly 18 years (!) of advising buyers and sellers of middle-market firms that offer enterprise and vertical application software, services, data and analytics – including the many managers of firms operating in the broad b2b FinTech ecosystem. We thank you for your trust!
2019 has been one for our record books: 12 successfully closed m&a transactions to date (the year isn’t over yet); counterparties in five countries: US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Sweden (six countries if you count Scotland and England as two); three new senior bankers, and a new Chicago office.
We are thankful for the honor (and aware of the responsibility) that comes with being trusted to advise company founders, VC and private equity firms, and corporations around the world on what is, for some, one of their most important economic and strategic decisions. We constantly strive to earn that trust. We’ll never stop.
We take all these assignments very seriously – especially those involving founders. Ask the founders of StatPro, GBST, ClearStructure, and P2Sample who trusted us to advise them on sales to important strategic partners. Ask the founders of Sermo, Kore.ai and inRule who trusted us to find the right financial backer. Ask the founders of companies like TABS Analytics, who trusted us to help find, negotiate, and close on acquisitions – while helping secure financing for the transaction. We know how stressful these decisions can be and do our best to make it all go smoothly.
We are humbled to have been trusted this year – and every year by the leaders of financial sponsors such as Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategic Investments Group, whom we advised on the exit of their portfolio company ZoomData. (This was the third Goldman-owned portfolio company that we have advised.)
We are thankful for the trust placed in us from managers and boards of leading international corporations such as Preqin, who asked us to advise on the sale of their Solutions unit to Dynamo Software, and TradingScreen’s leaders who trusted us to advise them on finding the right strategic partner for their UK-based subsidiary BidFX (minority investment by SGX). As well as by the management and Boards of StatPro and GBST who trusted us to advise them on very significant sale transactions.
We thank you – our clients and friends – for the privilege of working with great people and great companies – worldwide, on truly inspiring projects. We are excited to see what 2020 holds, and are thrilled to have you with us for the next part of the journey.
Stay safe, have fun, and have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving holiday.
Sincerely,
