Member Article

Conviction Investment Partners facilitates secondary market opportunities

One of the investments made by Newcastle-based Conviction Investment Partners (CIP), event lead capture solution company Akkroo, has been acquired by US-based Integrate with investors offered the opportunity to acquire further £2.4m of stock in the business.

The syndicate led the £1.75m Series A round of funding in June 2018 with CIP investing £1.5m and existing investors the remaining £0.25m.

Integrate acquired Akkroo as part of its expansion plans in Europe. The merger is expected to deliver significant synergies to both companies facilitating numerous cross-selling opportunities and respective global roll outs.

The merger sees the Akkroo and Integrate platforms combine, providing existing Integrate customers with access to Akkroo’s market leading event lead management solution, whilst enabling Integrate to take a big step forward in their strategy to unify all ‘top of funnel’ channels for B2B marketers.

As lead investors, CIP offered the opportunity to their co-investors to gain and build exposure in Akkroo and therefore in the joint entity. As no additional capital was raised during the merger, the only stock available was through CIP’s Secondary Market.

The syndicate, Conviction Investment Partners (CIP), offers ‘Just in Time’ finance to a select number of fast-growing companies. Rather than providing large blocks of expensive capital upfront, the ‘Just in Time’ model invests smaller amounts of money each year, providing that the company hits its growth targets. This means that founders of companies are typically diluted much less than if they were funded through a traditional VC model.

It also means that syndicate investors can take smaller positions and add to them only when and if the investee companies hit their high growth targets.

The CIP syndicate invests exclusively in high-growth early stage companies that employ the Cloud to build disruptive Software as a Service (SaaS) based model.

The Conviction partnership is led by founding shareholder Andrew Jenkins, who has invested in disruptive technologies for 10 years, most notably Mimecast, which is now Nasdaq listed at over $2bn.

Andrew is supported by Jeremy Middleton CBE, Managing Director of successful private investment company Middleton Enterprises Limited, and co-founder of home emergencies repairs business HomeServe plc, now a FTSE 250 company valued at over £2.5bn Andrew said: “Integrate is the world’s leading provider of Demand Marketing Orchestration software, which supports large enterprises to manage business leads generated by digital marketing. There is a real synergy between Integrate and Akkroo with significant growth projections for the merged entity.” Jeremy said: “We are high conviction investors, hence the name Conviction Investment Partners! Both Andrew and I act as lead investors and always personally invest, and we increased our personal positions in the merged entity.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by News Gathering .