Investis Sold to Gresham Private Equity
We are delighted to see today’s announcement of the simultaneous sale of Investis, the digital IR and corporate communications company, and Morningstar Investor Relations Services (formerly Hemscott) to Gresham Private Equity for a combined £30m. Investis represents £25m of the headline price.
We invested in Investis during the Series A round in 2000; since then, we have seen it grow under the leadership of former Guardian Unlimited executive Justin Walters into the dominant force in European digital IR, acting for over 1,000 companies in 30 countries. The investment has delivered us a strong return and the all-cash deal is a fitting reward for management’s persistence in pursuing their original vision.
Investis originally started as an outsource provider of IR websites for listed UK companies. Investis’ ability to design and manage a corporation’s IR pages with an identical look and feel to their main site proved an immediate hit and the company began to scale. Since those early days, the company has developed its services to include app building and management, social media IR strategies and execution, video conferencing with investors and online financial reporting. The company now boasts more than half the FTSE-100 as its clients and acts for hundreds of companies listed on other bourses around the world.
We were originally attracted by Investis’ first mover advantage, its scalable business model with strong recurring income and the management team. Clients find the economies of scale in farming out their IR pages extremely compelling, as Investis is constantly developing its service to stay up with new developments in online investor relations. This has resulted in an intuitively obvious set of benefits in buying from Investis and strong customer loyalty.
We wish the new management team led by co-founder Helen James every success in the future.
