Austin, Texas & Munich, Germany, 6th December 2023: Zilliant, the leader in price and revenue optimization and management, today announced that it has closed its acquisition of In Mind Cloud, a digital sales platform purpose-built for manufacturers. This combination will enable companies to manage the full pricing lifecycle from one platform by adding In Mind Cloud’s next generation Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) and commerce technology to Zilliant’s pricing management and optimization solutions.
Zilliant helps many of the largest companies in the world react to changes in market inputs, optimize their pricing, and deliver critical insights to sales. With the addition of In Mind Cloud, customers will be able to seamlessly deliver that pricing through CPQ and online channels, completing the final mile of the pricing lifecycle on a single platform.
“The acquisition of In Mind Cloud allows us to accelerate our vision to help customers put pricing at the heart of their business,” said Zilliant CEO Pascal Yammine. “Price is the most important part of every deal, but without a comprehensive solution to put the right price in front of the customer, it’s difficult to close complex deals fast. The combined platform will be unlike anything in the market and help manufacturers and distributors solve emerging pricing challenges like omni-channel commerce.”
In Mind Cloud’s next generation CPQ was built to challenge many of the limitations of existing solutions. Before the creation of In Mind Cloud, customers were limited in choice as CPQ software was divided into two major groups: easy to use or able to handle complexity.
“There was a disconnect in the market about complexity for manufacturers,” said Dr. Christian Cuske, Founder and Executive Chairman of In Mind Cloud. “Product complexity can be a competitive advantage, but it’s detrimental to a company if it’s complex to do business with them. Manufacturers had to choose a CPQ that could either handle their product complexities, but was challenging to navigate, or one that was easy to use, until In Mind Cloud changed that paradigm.”
With an intuitive Amazon-like user experience that includes 3D/2D configuration, a highly performant configuration engine and integrations into SAP and Salesforce, In Mind Cloud’s next generation CPQ has challenged the market status quo. Easy configuration experiences and market leading SAP integration has enabled customers to unlock value in weeks to months – as opposed to years – and has significantly derisked CPQ implementations. Businesses can even get their hands on the product right away through a web-based free trial, which is unprecedented in the CPQ market. As Cuske and the team have scaled the business, they’ve also recognized that the market is evolving.
“On our mission to revolutionize how manufacturers sell, we saw the increasing importance of the pricing lifecycle,” said Cuske. “Deal configuration through CPQ or self-service and the complexities of the full pricing lifecycle must work in conjunction. Zilliant’s leadership in manufacturing and distribution makes bringing our companies together an ideal next chapter in the In Mind Cloud growth story.”
Acquisition Boosts Zilliant’s Momentum Following an Exceptionally Strong Quarter
Zilliants momentum continues to build with world-wide third quarter bookings growing more than 75% year-over-year. Over the past year, Zilliant’s new business in Europe has more than doubled with its recent increased focus on expansion into Germany driving a 500%+ increase in new bookings for the country. In Mind Cloud’s credibility and headquarters in Germany amplifies Zilliant’s international reach across the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific markets.
“Zilliant has been the industry-leader in price and revenue optimization and we remain excited about their long term growth trajectory,” said Scott Pasquini, Managing Director of Madison Dearborn Partners. “Together, In Mind Cloud and Zilliant will enable customers to manage the entire pricing lifecycle from a single platform, which will help accelerate profitable growth.”
Lincoln International served as the exclusive financial advisor to Zilliant and Reed Smith LLP provided legal counsel. Wilkie Farr & Gallagher LLP provided legal counsel to In Mind Cloud.
Breaking the stalemate
Our latest market perspectives
The growth equity market has been stuck in an uneasy stalemate for the past six months. After a bruising 2022, tech investors came back to the market this year more cautious and unwilling to pay the premium valuations of the past. Founders, however, were not willing to accept these new terms and instead used a patchwork of internal top-up rounds, venture debt and cost cuts to extend their runway by two or three more quarters. The hope is that this would enable them to grow into their past valuations and raise – or achieve a quick exit – in a more bullish macro environment.
This stalemate is coming to an end. The near-term macro outlook remains
challenging, M&A activity limited and the companies’ cash runways are starting to run short. At the same time, many venture investors themselves are looking to raise their next fund and now need to demonstrate cash exits to their prospective LPs, not just the paper mark-ups of the past. This liquidity pressure is driving a growing deal pipeline which we expect to translate into steadily increasing deal volumes throughout 2024 as companies are forced to return back to the markets.
There remain record levels of dry powder in the market. However, we expect this to offer little valuation support in the growth equity segment. The vast majority of the dry powder sits in larger tech buyout funds where deal activity and valuations this year have remained just as competitive as in 2021. The growth equity market has shown starkly different trends in recent quarters with much more suppressed deal activity and valuations.
We expect 2024 onwards to become strong deal vintages for growth equity funds. Growing deal volumes and scarce liquidity will drive down valuations in the growth equity segment, while the underlying structural growth in the B2B technology market remains unchanged. However, challenges remain for tech investors. The software industry is undergoing a seismic shift due to AI and macro headwinds are changing software buying behaviour. Investors will need deep domain expertise and continuous learning to navigate these trends successfully – but those that succeed, will be rewarded with the opportunity for multiple years of outsized returns.
A successful final close and resilient growth
Yttrium firm update
Portfolio & exits: Our B2B technology portfolio is continuing to show resilient, strong growth. In H1, our fund II companies achieved ca.40% year-on-year growth with North America remaining the key growth driver. We are working actively with our companies to accelerate value creation through improved cost efficiency. These efforts are paying off with our fund II portfolio boosting EBITDA margins by ca.15 percentage points year-on-year in H1. Delivering strong cash returns to our investors remain the key priority. Following strong exit activity in 2022 (orderbird, riskmethods, ChartIQ), we are now also preparing the next set of companies for successful exits in the coming quarters.
New investments: Amidst a more challenging investment environment, we have doubled-down on our thematic sourcing efforts to identify the strongest performing, at scale B2B technology companies across Europe. In the first half of this year, we screened nearly 500 new opportunities with this approach and performed more detailed analysis on over 100 of these. We remain highly disciplined on company quality requirements and valuations and year-to-date we did not identify the deal opportunities that met our returns criteria. We see a strong deal pipeline developing for the coming quarters and are already now starting active discussions for multiple new deal opportunities.
People & platform: Talent and technology are the key pillars of our firm’s long-term success. We have made significant progress over the past two years building our fund’s technology platform, using software to automate and enhance our investment processes end-to-end, from deal sourcing to portfolio value creation. For example, we have recently integrated generative AI tools into our deal sourcing processes to help identify and categorize new deal opportunities instantaneously.
Fundraising: We successfully completed the final close of our second fund (DGF II) at EUR 403 million in May, a 15% increase vs. DGF I. We saw strong recommitment from our existing LPs and have retained the high quality, well diversified LP base of our first fund. We would like to take the opportunity again to thank all our investors for their continued trust and support and we look forward to maintaining a close working relationship going forward.
Frankfurt/Munich, 6th June 2023: Yttrium, the growth capital specialist for fast growing technology companies, has successfully closed its second growth fund for B2B software and technology companies with a total of EUR 403 million. This follows Yttrium’s Digital Growth Fund I with a final close in July 2018 at EUR 349 million.
The firm was founded in 2015 as Digital+ Partners and started its investment activities in 2017 with the first closing of Digital Growth Fund I. The opening of the London office and rebranding to Yttrium as of January 1, 2023, marks the evolution of the firm towards a leading pan-European B2B technology growth investor. With the new fund, Yttrium is well positioned to continue financing the growth of companies with proven technologies, led by ambitious entrepreneurs and having the potential to become global category leaders. Yttrium can invest up to EUR 50 million growth equity per company, including follow-on financings, and supports management teams for successful international scale-ups and relevant introductions to the firm’s unique corporate network.
Yttrium already returned significant capital to its limited partners with the full exit of orderbird and partial exits from riskmethods, Cosaic and LogPoint out of Digital Growth Fund I.
Yttrium’s portfolio comprises of 21 attractive growth companies
The fund invests in rapidly growing B2B software and software-enabled services companies in the broader industrial tech and financial services tech sectors. “We support innovative technology companies that are driving the digital transformation of European core industries,” says Patrick Beitel, one of the four founding partners of Yttrium. He adds: “Europe has an outstanding technology ecosystem for a B2B technology growth fund with its strong companies, high levels of research spending, and innovative research alliances. We want to seize growth opportunities within Europe’s outstanding B2B ecosystem for promising technology companies and for our investors.”
“Given the success of our first fund, we are strongly encouraged to continue our strategy financing European B2B technology scale-ups”, explains Thomas Jetter, founding partner. “We have maintained and further expanded our loyal investor base with our unique value proposition”, adds Axel Krieger, founding partner. Yttrium actively tracks more than 15.000 growth companies with a comprehensive assessment of more than 200 opportunities per year. “We provide growth capital for companies with proven technology and business models that have already established a broad revenue and customer base and are growing rapidly in a cash-efficient manner,” adds Dirk Schmücking, founding partner. “Most importantly, we invest in exceptional talent, helping leadership teams to take their businesses to the next level”.
As specialist for growth capital, Yttrium provides not only equity capital, but also its know-how and network of entrepreneurs and industry experts in Europe and the US. The Yttrium team is passionate about supporting portfolio companies to scale up their organizations and become global market leaders in well-defined segments, often mission-critical for their clients’ operations and digital transformation. Yttrium acts as their sparring partner, advising on key growth drivers and value creation initiatives like e.g., people development and recruiting world-class talent, sales & marketing, and ecosystem development.
The fund’s investors include leading institutional investors and technology companies as well as technology-oriented family offices in Germany, Europe, and the US.
Stockholm and Copenhagen, 2nd March 2023: Summa Equity announced the acquisition of a majority stake in Logpoint, the creator of a reliable, innovative cybersecurity operations platform — empowering organisations worldwide to thrive in a world of evolving digital threats.
Following the Summa investment, Yttrium will remain a significant minority shareholder in Logpoint.
Find out more about us, our offering and expert team.
Platform.sh Secures $140 million in Series D Funding to Support Enterprises in Scaling Fleets of Websites and Applications
Paris and San Francisco, 21st June 2022: Platform.sh, a unified, secure, enterprise-grade platform for building, running and scaling web applications, today announced it has raised $140 million in Series D funding. The round was led by Munich-based Digital+Partners, San Francisco-based Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, and Paris-based Revaia, alongside existing investors BGV, Eurazeo, Hiinov, and Partech, all re-investing.
HeyJobs raised $47 million in Series B financing led by Digital+ and
FMZ ventures, with participation from existing investors Notion Capital, Heartcore Capital and
Creathor Ventures. This is the largest financing round a career platform in Germany has ever
received.
HeyJobs was founded by Marius Jeuck and Marius Luther in 2016 in response to Europe’s
dramatically changing labor demographics: With the “boomer” generation nearing retirement,
European employers are facing steep declines in available workforce. For instance, Germany
alone is losing 500,000 workers annually. No wonder that German CEOs rank the “labor shortage”
their #1 concern for growth.
HeyJobs helps employers recruit ‘essential talent’ across 100 different professions such as lorry
drivers, nurses, or electricians. The company differentiates through their unique data set and
proprietary machine learning algorithms. “Whilst 5 years ago, we could identify who is a nurse
versus a driver, our AI has now learned to identify who is a qualified intensive care unit nurse that
seeks to do 3 night shifts”, says Marius Luther, Founder & CEO of HeyJobs. The vision of HeyJobs
is to become the #1 European Career Platform for essential talent. “It’s crazy how we as a society
have neglected the largest share of the workforce – 30 million alone in Germany, over 200 million
essential talent in Europe – for decades. They deserve better.”
Today, the HeyJobs talent platform is used by hundreds of thousands of jobseekers as well as
over 2’700 employers ranging from SMEs to the largest European employers. Their customers
have made over 100’000 hires through HeyJobs to date totalling over €5 billion in annual wages.
Marius Luther, Founder & CEO: “We are proud of the way we support companies to better and more
cost-effectively achieve their hiring goals. But what really moves me is that we changed the lives of
over 100’000 people through finding their next great opportunity. In 2021, we were responsible for
around 1% of all German hires. And while this is a nice proof of our relevance, it still feels like Day 1
in terms of the long term value we can create.”
“HeyJobs is very well positioned to become the international category leader for recruiting essential
talent” says Patrick Beitel, Founding Partner and Managing Director at Digital+ Partners. “In
combining an excellent team, a mature technology-driven organization and a product proposition
that is building on two pillars, essential talent and employers, HeyJobs is ideally equipped to
accelerate its growth in Germany, Europe and beyond.”
Michael Zeisser of FMZ Ventures, former Chairman Alibaba Investments and an investor in
numerous marketplaces explains his investment as: “HeyJobs is a leading next-generation
company in the emerging Experience Economy; its purpose is to provide users the economic
opportunity to realize their full human potential; it is a privilege to support this team and its
mission.”
HeyJobs will use the funding to push the application of artificial intelligence in talent acquisition,
supporting their mission of “helping everyone find the right job to live a fulfilling life.” With this at
heart, HeyJobs is also setting best practices as an employer of their own. Recently recognized as
the best tech employer in Berlin based on a Glassdoor rating of 4.7, the company has doubled its
headcount in the past 12 months to 300 employees and is continually hiring both new and
seasoned professionals across product, data science, engineering and business roles. Check out
their open positions here.
To support their mission, Dr. Katrin Suder joined as independent chairperson of HeyJobs Board of
Directors. She has substantial experience as a board member and chair in listed and privately
owned companies such as Cloudflare. Suder was appointed by German chancellor Angela Merkel
and her cabinet to chair the German Digital Council in 2018. Prior to this, she was State Secretary
in the German Ministry of Defense. She started her career and became Senior Partner at McKinsey
& Company, where she was in charge of the German Public Sector Practice. In 2011, she
published “Competitive Advantage: Skilled Workers”, a widely cited white paper on strategies for
German companies to win in difficult macro-demographic times. “My career has been focused on
data, technology, business, and policy, and HeyJobs is a company that is at the intersection of
those areas,” said Suder.
“I look forward to supporting this exciting and highly needed mission.”
For any questions, please reach out to: press@heyjobs.co
The Munich-based founders have developed a platform for property managers and housing companies. With fresh money, they now want to expand internationally.
Munich: The corona pandemic has also given the more conservative real estate industry a boost to digitization. During the lockdowns, many property managers and housing companies, who still worked a lot with file folders and telephones, switched to software solutions.
Casavi has particularly benefited from this trend. The Munich-based start-up has developed a digital platform for the industry. “It was a great year for us,” co-founder Oliver Stamm told Handelsblatt. According to industry estimates, sales are likely to have doubled this year to a higher single-digit million amount.
Now the company has also been able to convince other investors. Casavi has raised 20 million euros of fresh capital, as was announced on Thursday. The Series B financing round was led by digital+ Partners, Wachstumsfonds Bayern and High-Tech Gründerfonds.
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Goal: become Europe’s market leader for recruitment solutions
150+ recruitments planned in 2022, in France and Europe
25 million applicants accompanied in their job search in Europe, in 2023
Paris, October 18th 2021 – CleverConnect, specialist in recruitment solutions, announced the closing of a new €30 million Series B funding round led by Digital+ Partners (Germany). The long-standing current investors, Citizen Capital and Sofiouest also participated in this round. This new financing will enable the company not only to accelerate its European expansion, but also to strengthen the team and accelerate investments in AI to revolutionize Talent Acquisition solutions. CleverConnect’s ambition is to become the European leader in the Talent Acquisition market, and to support more and more candidates in their job search, all across the continent.
€30 million to expand business across the European continent…
Backed by this new funding, CleverConnect aims to accelerate the spread of its solutions in Europe. To achieve this, the company plans to double down on in Germany, strengthen its presence in Southern Europe, and expand into Northern Europe (Belgium, Netherlands, Scandinavia). In more concrete actions, this means:
– an increase in the number of employees already present in Spain and Italy (+15 hires planned)
– Opening an office in Germany (early 2022), sustained by recruiting a team of 20 people.
– Starting presence in Northern Europe (Netherlands, Denmark), with 5 hires
In total, no less than 150 new hires are anticipated between now and the end of 2022, 40 of which will bolster CleverConnect’s international ambitions, primarily in sales positions. More than 100 employees will also join the company’s French workforce, half of them working for product and tech.
… to become the leader for Talent Acquisition driven by AI
This new phase is a mark of CleverConnect’s strong intent to support more and more companies of all sizes (from SMEs to Enterprises) in all their recruitment needs, both in France and abroad, as well as more and more candidates in their job search. With over 7.5 million people already subscribed to its Meteojob platform, this expansion into the European market should enable the company to reach out and assist over 25 million candidates by the end of 2023. On this basis CleverConnect aims to become the European leader in Talent Acquisition by 2024.
This is a realistic ambition in a particularly high-potential market where, following the pandemic that has had an impact on working methods, companies have significantly accelerated digitizing HR and recruitment processes. CleverConnect was able to grow significantly over the past years, especially with tools like Video Interviewing, Smart Career Websites and CV Matching. In 2020 alone 840,000 video interviews were conducted – a 120% increase.
“We are entering an extremely tense recruitment period in Europe over the next 24 months, due to the post-Covid recovery, high turnover in companies, and labour shortages in many sectors. Given the context, recruitment has become a strategic challenge for companies more than ever before,” emphasizes Marko Vujasinovic, CEO of CleverConnect.
“These companies will have to undergo an in-depth transformation and start taking their recruitment processes digital, to make them more agile and more responsive to candidates, at the risk of finding themselves in a difficult situation. Clearly, AI will play a major role in transforming recruitment processes by connecting companies and candidates while suggesting new career paths and opportunities,” adds Louis Coulon, co-founder of CleverConnect.
“If we are investing so much in R&D, it is also because we believe in the role we can play in transforming the labour market, to be more transparent, equitable, and just. That is also why we are so committed, and it’s CleverConnect ultimate goal” says Gonzague Lefebvre, Co-founder in charge of the group’s strategy.
Julian Mattes, Partner at Digital+ Partners: “The rising Talent war puts an AI-based recruitment solution on the agenda of many companies. We firmly believe that CleverConnect will establish itself as the leading pan-European recruitment software. We are happy to support the team around Marko, Louis and Gonzague with their scaling.”
About CleverConnect
CleverConnect is an expert in French HR Technology, helping more than 2,500 companies to rethink their recruitment strategy in order to successfully attract, convert and evaluate their candidates in an intelligent and innovative way. To do so, CleverConnect offers SaaS solutions for résumé matching, video interviewing and intelligent career sites. These solutions are currently used by clients, major accounts such as Leroy Merlin, Orange, SMCP, Colas, Korian, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole… CleverConnect also owns the job search site meteojob.com that lists more than 200,000 online job offers with 7.5 million registered users. In 2019, the company secured a €5.5 million round of financing from Sofiouest and impact investment fund, Citizen Capital. With operations in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, CleverConnect now employs a team of 180 people. www.cleverconnect.com
About Digital+ Partners
Based in Frankfurt and Munich, Germany, Digital+ Partners is a leading technology growth equity investor focused on DACH and European technology companies with over €550 million assets under management. Digital+ Partners aims to support ambitious entrepreneurs build global technology leaders, providing them with strategic advice and long-term financial support to help them define and execute their growth plans. Digital+ Partners focuses exclusively on B2B technology companies and leverages a deep corporate network to help portfolio companies access new markets and build new partnerships. www.dplus.partners
Contact:
Lenka Hildebrand | Investor Relations Manager
Direct: +49 69 907 2019-48
Frankfurt: The downside of the digitization of administration, business and healthcare shows leaks and breakdowns in data transmission. This brings encryption technology to the focus as a segment of IT technology. According to information from the F.A.Z., the venture capitalist Yttrium acquires a stake in a cybersecurity company: They invest at least 15 million euros in the provider FTAPI in Munich. This was confirmed by Thomas Jetter, Partner of Yttrium.
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