Financial Technology, Data, and Analytics

Dear Clients and Friends,

The report below gives our sense of the current m&a trends, values and deals in the four segments of the Enterprise Data and Analytics sector that we follow and sometimes lead.  

We’re big fans of firms that provide Enterprise Data and Analytics. They help others to gather massive amounts of fast-moving structured and unstructured data from dozens of sources (marketing, sales, web interactions, transactions, social media, weather, news, etc.) and then clean, integrate, aggregate, optimize, and analyze that data in an effort to find correlation, causation and anomalies. The result is better insights, inspiration, and decision-making. Sales and marketing programs can be better tailored, inventories better optimized; business can be more efficient.

These firms help Amazon give us better product recommendations, Spotify better music recommendations, and brokers make better recommendations about where we should put our money.  It’s supposed to be about the triumph of math over intuition. And often it works. Except when it doesn’t.

Data analytics are great – but intuition still counts. Mark Twain once famously said:  “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” We agree.

Analytics predict future behavior by assuming that there are patterns that will repeat. And in the aggregate, it often works. But not always. Sometimes the statistics lie. Else Hillary would be President and Brexit would not be happening.  The best results come when statistics and analytics are combined with human intuition – informed by knowledge and experience. Without that informed intuition Elon Musk would have never developed the Tesla; Steve Jobs would have never pushed the iPod or iTunes; there would be no Bluetooth, Skype, Kindle; YouTube, Tinder, or Facebook; no solar panels; no Internet!  It is the combination of Enterprise Data and Analytics with informed human intuition that leads to true insight. And we in the industry should never forget that.

Some of the most recent trends, values and more interesting m&a transactions in this space are described in our report below. A few of the recent deals include:

• Element AI (Montreal, QC) raised $102mm in a Series A funding round led by Data Collective,
• FusionOps (Mountain View, CA) raised $50mm in an equity funding round led by New Enterprise Associates,
• OPAP (Metochiou, Cyprus) agreed to acquire Neurosoft (BIT:NRST) for $38.3mm,
• GIC (Singapore) agreed to acquire a 30% stake in Mergermarket from BC Partners for an undisclosed sum,
• Investment Metrics received a significant equity investment from Resurgens Technology Partners and HarbourVest Partners. Marlin & Associates acted as exclusive strategic and financial advisor to Investment Metrics.

We were recently honored with a few industry awards, including M&A Cross-Border Deal of the Year Award for acting as exclusive strategic and financial advisor to Xignite from The M&A Advisor. We were also honored with the 2017 Boutique Investment Banking Firm Of The Year (US), 2017 Game changer of The Year (Ken Marlin), and 2017 TMT Advisory Firm of the Year (US) by the ACQ5 Global Awards. We work hard to help our clients achieve their long-term strategic goals and it is always a pleasure to have this hard work be recognized.