William Blair acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Nuxeo, a portfolio company of Goldman Sachs Private Capital and Kennet Partners, in connection with its pending sale to Hyland Software, a portfolio company of Thoma Bravo. The transaction was signed on February 27, 2021. The transaction is subject to information and consultation of employee representative bodies and to customary closing conditions (approval by competition authorities). The transaction is expected to close in early April 2021.
Transaction Highlights
- Deep sector expertise and relationships: Nuxeo recognized William Blair’s extensive knowledge and transaction experience advising software companies, and deep relationships with the most likely strategic and financial buyers. The transaction builds on William Blair’s existing experience in the Enterprise Content Management software market, having most recently advised on the sale of Germany-based DocuWare to Ricoh.
- M&A process and execution excellence: William Blair’s transaction team was integrally involved throughout each step of the transaction process, providing critical guidance to facilitate an accelerated timeline in a wholly virtual environment. The timeline was highly accelerated, with signing happening only eight days after initial offers. William Blair maintained significant competitive tension during the second phase of the process, with the winning bid improving substantially from initial offer levels.
- Cross-border transaction: William Blair’s transaction team leveraged its global capabilities and buyer relationships to advise Nuxeo on transaction development with Hyland Software, and several other international parties. This transaction represents the 15th transaction William Blair has done with Thoma Bravo over the last five years.
About the Companies
Nuxeo is a leading cloud-native Enterprise Content Platform, combining a low-code application development platform with unique AI / ML capabilities, allowing enterprises to rapidly build and deploy content-rich applications and automate content-centric process workflows at scale. The Nuxeo platform focuses on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) use cases for large enterprises, and they have five of the Fortune 10 companies as customers. Today their technology platform is being used for ECM modernization within the Financial Services industry, and DAM for product-oriented companies. Nuxeo has been recognized by industry analysts as the leader in its space, being the only vendor to have one single product across both the ECM and DAM markets. Nuxeo is based in London, with a significant U.S. presence.
Hyland Software provides enterprise content management and process management software. Applications of Hyland’s suite of software are used in various sectors, including Healthcare, Financial Services, Government, Higher Education and Manufacturing. Hyland Software is located in Ohio, with over 4,000 employees globally.
Based in New York, Goldman Sachs Private Capital is Goldman Sachs’ investment platform dedicated to providing long-term capital to growth and middle-market companies throughout Europe and Israel.
Kennet Partners is a London based private equity investment firm with additional office in San Francisco. The firm provides growth capital to software, internet and technology-enabled business services companies in Europe and the U.S.
Learn more about our technology investment banking expertise.