Partners Group, a Swiss investment management firm, announced that it has acquired Forterro from Battery Ventures at an enterprise value of €1B. The deal was signed last week and is set to be completed following the necessary clearances.
Why this acquisition?
Partners Group will work with Forterro’s management and help them expand its platform across Europe. The Swiss company also plans to accelerate Forterro’s organic growth by expanding go-to-market initiatives.
It also plans to make strategic acquisitions in adjacent geographies and sub-verticals, including cloud offerings and operational efficiency.
Forterro: What you need to know
Founded in 2012, Forterro is a European provider of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software and services for SMBs.
Based out of London, the company has a portfolio of 11 ERP software brands, serving over 10,000 customers in the manufacturing space.
The company has over 1,200 employees across its 40 European offices – located in the UK, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Poland – and global development centres.
“Over the past year, we have spent a great deal of time developing strategies for growth and investing in the people and infrastructure we need to achieve a brand new vision—something we’ve been calling ‘Forterro 3.0’,” said Dean Forbes, CEO of Forterro.
“The final piece of the puzzle was partnering with an investor that would share this vision with us, and Partners Group is the right partner for us,” he adds.
Partners Group: What you need to know
Based out of Baar, Switzerland, Partners Group is a global private markets firm with $127B in assets under management and more than 1,500 professionals across 20 offices worldwide.
“Forterro has been on an incredible journey, evolving from a Nordics-based on-premise manufacturing ERP vendor to an extremely well-run, pan-European group of specialised ERP businesses,” said Bilge Ogut, partner and head of private equity technology at Partners Group.
He continues, “We came to the table confident in the quality of Forterro’s products and the people behind them. However, it’s the group’s prospects for growth—underpinned by its exceptional 2021 results—that has us excited about our path forward together.”
Arma Partners acted as an exclusive financial advisor to Forterro on the transaction.
“We are ready to become more than the sum of our parts,” said Forbes. “We join with Partners Group today to begin a journey toward becoming a unified, subscription-based and cloud-ready ERP platform with a broader range of capabilities that will more deeply serve the industrial midmarket,” he concludes.
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