FluidOne, a provider of connected cloud solutions, has agreed a long-term refinancing package with Pemberton Asset Management to fuel its ambitious plans to treble in size over the next five years.
This will provide funding for future strategic add-on acquisitions and support FluidOne’s plans to acquire multiple businesses a year going forward.
Since investment from Livingbridge in 2019, supporting an MBO led by CEO Russell Horton, the business has quadrupled in size with revenue growing to £109 million on the back of eight acquisitions.
FluidOne combines IT and cybersecurity with connectivity and communications to allow its clients’ staff to work securely from anywhere. It now has 50% IT and cyber revenue mix and recurring revenues of over 70%.
“It gives me great pleasure to announce our new partnership with Pemberton,” said Horton. “To support our ambitious plans, we ran a process to seek a refinance package that would give flexibility and facilities to support us over the long term.
“During this competitive process Pemberton stood out as the ideal partner given how their expert team engaged to devise a tailored package to fit our requirements and due to their track record of supporting high growth, evolving businesses.
“We have our next acquisition in process that will be the first deployment of our new facility, and a pipeline of follow-on targets that fit our Connected Cloud Solutions strategy.”
Simon Hollingsworth, partner at Livingbridge, said: “The new debt facility provides the scale and flexibility we were seeking to support the next phase of growth for FluidOne in an exciting growth market.
“The strategy since investment with Russell and the team has been to build critical capability in the highest value, next generation product sets to make FluidOne the leading UK IT and cyber managed service provider.
“We now believe we have the right value-add capabilities to deliver this across both customer segments and market verticals making FluidOne a high quality and differentiated business.”
Richard Meehan, managing director, origination at Pemberton, said: “We are delighted to be partnering with the FluidOne team and Livingbridge on this transaction.
“Russell and his team have built an exceptional platform across both product capability and customer service levels, translating into market leading customer satisfaction and retention rates.
“Pemberton has considerable experience in the I.T. services market and view the business to be ideally positioned to benefit from continued strong demand for cloud and cybersecurity services.
“We also look forward to helping the company execute on its ambitious acquisition strategy, with a number of near-term targets already well progressed.”