Analysis of 13 Data & Analytics M&A and Fundraising Deals - August 20-27, 2024
TL;DR - Rumoured sales of Featurespace, OSSTRA; acquisitions by Lightcast, Circana, Cisco, Endeavor, Thomson Reuters, Logically; investments in Harvest, MIH, Story, Space Intelligence, Beyond Math.
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There were so many transactions in the last week that (once again) this post will not fit in the email!
If you find that your email client has cut off the post, please click through and read the full post online:
If you were the banker or investor on any of these deals, and would like to discuss the sector, drop us a line!
August 27 - Lightcast, a provider of global labor market data, analytics, and expert guidance, announced that it had acquired Stratigens, a UK-based talent intelligence provider.
KKR-backed Lightcast has been on an acquisitions lick in recent times:
January 2024 - eIMPACT provider of data visualization dashboards;
September 2023 - NACM, Embark surveys of alumni;
April 2023 - Gazelle - a Montreal-based company and contact data provider.
Wales-based Stratigens adds enriched Labour Market Data & Analytics, and an increased European presence, to Lightcast’s existing offering.
KKR created Lightcast in 2021 through the merger of Burning Glass and Emsi.
We looked a little at the HR Data & Analytics market in one of our first posts back in March, when we wrote about Revelio Labs:
August 27 - Harvest welcomes two new shareholders, TA Associates and Montagu Private Equity.
Back in February the news leaked that Arma Partners was advising Five Arrows on the sale of French Wealth Management Software, Data & Analytics provider Harvest.
The process concluded this week with the transferral of ownership from Five Arrows to TA and Montagu.
Harvest owns Quantalys, a provider of Data & Analytics on the Asset Management sector.
Five Arrows paid EUR120.9m for Harvest in 2019. The price for the current transaction was not disclosed. But on estimated “EBITDA in the region of EUR20m-EUR25m in 2023”, a valuation approaching EUR500m is not unfeasible.
According to Bloomberg it's an all-equity deal for now - a private credit package will be arranged further down the line.
August 26 — Circana, a leading advisor on the complexity of consumer behavior, announced it has entered into definitive agreements to acquire NCSolutions (NCS), the joint venture between Nielsen and Catalina that improves advertising effectiveness, and Nielsen’s Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) business.
Circana has added these two Data & Analytics offerings to “expand its media measurement capabilities while also increasing its marketing mix modeling and unified measurement solutions and footprint.”
Circana tracks millions of products spanning 2,000+ categories across 500,000+ stores in 20 countries, with insights powered by the industry’s most advanced technology platform, Liquid Data®. Today, Circana advises almost 7,000 brands and retailers worldwide.
Circana has had a busy year of corporate events.
In April, Vestar Capital Partners moved the business into a $1.2bn single-asset continuation vehicle. Blackstone Strategic Partners and HarbourVest Partners acted as lead investors in the transaction.
The press release for that deal summarises the recent history of Circana well:
Vestar led a recapitalization of Information Resources Inc, Circana’s predecessor, with IRI’s original control shareholder New Mountain Capital in 2018. In 2022, IRI merged with NPD Group, a Hellman & Friedman portfolio company, to form Circana, now jointly owned by H&F, Vestar, NMC and management.
For that transaction Evercore and Jefferies LLC served as financial advisors and Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal advisor to Vestar.
Circana also acquired golfing Retail Data & Analytics provider Golf Datatech earlier this year.
Catalina has been limping along ever since its Chapter 11 in 2018, which Forbes blamed on it being overloaded with debt by Berkshire Partners and Hellman & Friedman. Back on an even keel, and still under Berkshire’s control, it’s no surprise to see it offload an asset.
Many advisors were involved in this week’s transaction:
Circana is advised by Dentons and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Nielsen is advised by Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Baker McKenzie, DLA Piper and Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. Catalina is advised by Weil Gotshal and Manges.
Expect more deals from Circana.
August 26 - Cisco announces intent to acquire Robust Intelligence.
We spend a lot of time at Asymmetrix telling anyone who will listen about the value in Cyber Security Data & Analytics. Oftentimes their eyes glaze over and we walk away disappointed, wondering whether anyone will ever agree with us…
Robust Intelligence helps organizations to securely deploy AI applications while adhering to industry and regulatory standards. They identify security issues in AI models which could be exploited by malicious actors and sell that data, and software around it, to businesses.
Cisco was already a backer of Robust, and used its $1bn AI fund to make the full acquisition. Tiger Global, Sequoia, Harpoon and Engineering Capital had also invested in Robust in its $30m Series B round in December 2021.
Eddie Lee at Perella Weinberg advised Robust Intelligence.
August 26 - Endeavor Business Media announces acquisition of Scranton Gillette Communications Buildings Media & Event brands.
Backed by Invergarry Holdings and Resolute Capital Partners, Endeavor has been hoovering up unloved old-school B2B media properties since 2017, including publications and events from Informa and Clarion. Scranton Gillette’s construction related events and media brands fit the strategy perfectly.
Endeavor Business Media now has content across aviation, buildings and construction, dental, electronics, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, networking systems, public safety, transportation, and water.
August 24 - Featurespace in talks about Visa takeover.
Sky News broke the story last week that Cambridge, UK-based GRC Data & Analytics player Featurespace is on the verge of being acquired by payments giant, Visa.
According to the article, the deal “could value Featurespace, which was set up in 2008, at approximately £700m”.
The company has raised in the region of £100m from investors in a series of funding rounds, including Insight Venture Partners, IP Group, Chrysalis, Mission OG and Highland Europe.
Mike Lynch was a key backer and influence on Featurespace since its inception.
August 22 - Miami International Holdings, Inc. (MIH), a technology-driven builder and operator of regulated financial markets across multiple asset classes, announced a $100m investment from Warburg Pincus. Subject to certain conditions, Warburg Pincus may expand its investment in MIH to support additional growth.
Miami is continuing on its COVID-accelerated journey to become Wall Street South.
The investment will fund the construction and fit-out of a physical trading floor in Miami, Florida for MIAX Sapphire, MIH's fourth national securities exchange for trading U.S. multi-listed options. MIAX Sapphire will operate both an electronic exchange and physical trading floor. The electronic exchange successfully launched on August 12, 2024, with the trading floor in Miami scheduled to go live in 2025.
MIAX Sapphire will be the first national securities exchange to establish operations in Miami.
In addition:
The investment will also support further growth and expansion of MIH's agricultural and financial futures businesses on its two U.S. futures exchanges, Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX) and MIAXdx including the development of new matching engine and clearing technology using MIH's proprietary technology. Additionally, the investment will fund the Company's expansion plans into international markets including the development and trading of new proprietary and other financial products.
MIAX provides Market Data feeds across their options and equity markets.
Piper Sandler & Co. acted as financial advisor to MIH and Broadhaven Capital Partners acted as financial advisor to Warburg Pincus in connection with the transaction.
August 22 - CME and S&P Global mull sale of joint venture OSTTRA.
While OSSTRA isn’t strictly speaking a Data & Analytics business, its two joint owners are.
Launched in September 2021:
OSTTRA, 50/50 owned by CME Group and IHS Markit, is a provider of progressive post-trade solutions for the global OTC markets across interest rate, FX, equity and credit asset classes. It incorporates CME Group's optimization businesses – Traiana, TriOptima, and Reset – and IHS Markit's MarkitSERV.
S&P have divested several non-core businesses recently (we reported on Fincentric last week - see below) so it’s not a surprise that they would want to let go of OSTTRA.
OSSTRA will likely be of interest to a range of Private Equity firms. Bloomberg reports that the business may be valued at between $2-4bn.
Watch this space.
August 21 - Andreessen Horowitz backs blockchain-for-IP developer Story at $2.25bn valuation.
Story raised $80m of Series B funding for a blockchain designed to prevent artificial intelligence makers like OpenAI from taking creators’ intellectual property without permission.
Story enables creators to prove they made a piece of content and are the intellectual property owners by storing their IP on its platform. The firm’s tech works to protect individuals and entities’ IP by embedding terms associated with it, such as licensing fees and royalty-sharing arrangements, into smart contracts.
“Now it’s turned from IP into IP Lego,” [founder SY] Lee told CNBC. “Now, you don’t need to go through lawyers. You don’t need to go through the agents. You don’t need to do this very lengthy business development negotiation. You just embed your licensing, royalty-sharing terms into small contracts.”
Crypto-focused venture capital firm Polychain also invested in the round.
August 21 - Space Intelligence raises Series A funding from AzurX Space Ventures and Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE) to build a global, audit-grade nature mapping dataset.
We’ve written repeatedly about both ESG and the democratisation of low-earth orbit satelite data. See below for a few examples.
Space Intelligence is focused on creating Data & Analytics to support forest carbon project development and review to help de-risk investment and maximize impact.
Space Intelligence’s dataset currently only covers Cambodia, Kenya, Tanzania and Scotland, so it’s understandable that they now want to apply their methodology to a global dataset.
Founded in 2017, Space Intelligence has now reached 50 employees and seems an attractive future target for both strategics and private equity. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.
![Jua - AI Weather Data & Analytics [company analysis]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tKyk!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc17b1df2-3403-449a-8626-660f32780b20_1280x847.jpeg)
August 20 - Thomson Reuters Corporation acquires Safe Sign Technologies, a UK-based startup that is developing legal-specific large language models (LLMs), to accelerate its AI strategy.
A month ago we highlighted Harvey’s $100m Series C round from Google Ventures, OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, and SV Angel, valuing Harvey at $1.5bn:
(Apologies if you were waiting for the promised detailed piece on Harvey - it has fallen by the wayside. Mail us if you are very interested to see one and we will gauge our readership’s interest.)
We then talked, in the following article, about why these valuations make sense in the context that, one day, one of these companies will actually create the AI-replacement to the professional services worker. And, when that happens, you want to be an investor, so it makes sense to have some skin in the game.
This investment from Thomson Reuters feels very much along the same lines. We know that AI is in TR’s top two market drivers:
Two important market dynamics are providing what we expect to be long-term demand tailwinds for our business. The first is the rising complexity of regulatory compliance, and the second is generative AI. - Steve Hasker, President & CEO, Thomson Reuters - Earnings call Q1 2024 - May 2, 2024
We looked at TR’s and other listed Data & Analytics C-suite’s opinions on AI here:
August 20 - BeyondMath, a leader in advanced engineering simulation, announced it has secured $8.5 million in seed funding led by UP.Partners, with significant participation from Insight Partners and InMotion Ventures, the investment arm of JLR.
This one is a stretch, as it’s modelling software for engineering. But it’s underpinned by Data & Analytics. Plus we’re a sucker for sexy, high-tech businesses, and BeyondMath is most definitely one of them.
This funding supports BeyondMath’s ambitious mission to reshape engineering practices globally with its AI-driven multiphysics simulation platform, which accelerates engineering iterations by a factor of 1,000 compared to current solutions.
August 20 - Logically acquires Insikt AI to supercharge efforts in developing technology to combat harmful online content.
A seven-person tuck-in acquisition for Disinformation-Countering Data & Analytics provider Logically.
Logically raised $24m in 2022 from Vitruvian Partners, the Amazon Alexa Fund, XTX Ventures and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF), managed by Mercia Asset Management Plc.
We looked at Logically’s competitor Cybara in July after they announced plans to list on NASDAQ through a combination with Trailblazer Merger Corporation, a SPAC, at a total enterprise value of $70m.
Given the global trend for “fake news” this is a hot space, with various other providers also growing fast.
I would have thought this was a no-brainer Alex;
We spend a lot of time at Asymmetrix telling anyone who will listen about the value in Cyber Security Data & Analytics. Oftentimes their eyes glaze over and we walk away disappointed, wondering whether anyone will ever agree with us…