[March 2018]
NorthEdge Capital invests in Cloud Technology Solutions
Cloud specialist eyes international expansion and further growth following NorthEdge investment
NorthEdge Capital has invested for a significant stake in cloud transformation and infrastructure specialist Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS), backing the incumbent management team led by CEO James Doggart, CSO Steve Dobson and CFO Hannah Liptrott.
Founded 10 years ago and headquartered in Manchester city centre, CTS provides cloud transformation services and software products to a broad range of businesses. The Google Premier Partner has migrated over seven million users to the ‘cloud’.
CTS has undertaken transformation projects for Ladbrokes-Coral Group plc, HomeServe plc, Roadchef and recently worked with Manchester City Council, migrating over 7,000 local authority workers to Google G Suite. CTS has also developed a strong offering in Google Cloud Platform and IaaS. Additionally, the software products created by CTS, CloudMigrator™ and Cloud Pages™, are now used by over 10 million users worldwide in over 74 different countries.
CTS has experienced a period of strong growth, with revenue having tripled over the past three years, and has had a promising start to the year with several new business wins and an expansion of its city centre offices at Lowry House. The business now employs over 100 staff across its offices in Manchester, Belfast and Edinburgh.
NorthEdge’s investment will provide support for the business to continue the development of its own software products as well as providing development capital to accelerate growth through complementary acquisitions in machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analytics.
The deal was led by NorthEdge’s Jon Pickering, Partner and Head of North West, and Dan Matkin, Investment Manager. Jon joins the board at CTS as a Non-Executive Director, alongside recently appointed Ian Kelly as Chairman.
The investment extends NorthEdge’s recent track record of supporting Northern-based tech companies following its investment in Cubic Motion in September 2017 and recent successful exits of Utiligroup and Sumo Digital in the last 18 months.
James Doggart, CEO at Cloud Technology Services, said: “I’m really excited about the investment from NorthEdge. The timing is perfect given the growth of the market. It will allow us to take advantage of the global market demand for cloud, our plans have us doubling our workforce over the next three years.
“Our technology is currently used in 74 different countries, this funding means that we can push on even further globally, whilst continuing to accelerate the development of our products to offer industry defining value to our customers and partners.
“This investment will allow us to take our business to the next level and keep pace with the global investments of public cloud providers such as Google. This is an exciting time to be in the cloud space and we are now well placed to push on for growth.”
Richard Hall, CloudOrigin CEO, led the combined Technology and Operational Due Diligence and Technology Landscape Research on behalf of NorthEdge. Commenting “The opportunity for cloud migration and ongoing administration services, across the Google and Microsoft technology platforms is still at an early stage with excellent growth opportunities. Especially for a firm such as CTS with a deep pedigree, Software as a Service and On Premise tools with the flexibility to offer self-service or fully supported transitions from legacy collaboration systems as well as between cloud offerings”.
Jon Pickering, Partner at NorthEdge Capital, said: “Evolutions in the IT and technology sector are currently driving major growth of 40%+ per annum in the public cloud market as companies move away from traditional on premise to cloud hosted infrastructure.
“CTS is well placed given their proprietary technology to be at the forefront of this rapid expansion, and its team of software experts, led by James Doggart, has proven its ability to modernise major institutions and transform businesses so that they can seamlessly transition to the public cloud. We have been impressed by the team’s historic track record and we are excited by the growth prospects and international expansion potential for the business.
“We have provided acquisition funding to help the team accelerate their growth strategy and diversification of the business products and services early into our investment time horizon. This is an exciting and fast-growing market and we are pleased to support a locally based technology business”
For further details on the deal click here.