Contact: Scott Denne Matt Mullen
HGGC buys a majority stake in Selligent as the European marketing automation vendor aims to move into overseas markets. As part of the acquisition, HGGC will add capital to Selligent’s balance sheet, giving the company much-needed ammunition as it enters a crowded US market where it’s virtually unknown.
The company generates less than one-third of the revenue that publicly traded players in this space such as Marketo and HubSpot (which are more B2B-focused vendors) put up. It’s also facing competition from large enterprise software providers such as salesforce.com, Adobe and, most recently, NetSuite (with its acquisition of Bronto Software ), which have all invested hundreds of millions to carve out a lead in marketing automation.
Still, Selligent has several reasons to be optimistic about its expansion. The 25-year-old company has posted profitable growth for several years, it has a product portfolio that’s as deep as any of its competitors’ (as we discussed in a recent report), it has successfully moved into several European markets, and it managed a transition to a SaaS-based business without raising additional outside capital.
Jordan Edmiston Group advised Selligent on its sale.
For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.