Homegrown private equity major Everstone Capital has partially exited its over eight-year-old investment in Acqueon Technologies, formerly known as Servion Global Solutions Ltd, in a secondary transaction.
The PE fund has sold majority of its shareholding in the company, which is known for its omni-channel customer engagement software, to Long Ridge Equity Partners, a US-based private equity investor. Founded in 2007, Long Ridge Equity Partners primarily focusses on the companies in financial and business technology sectors.
“During its tenure as an investor, Everstone executed various value-creation initiatives in Acqueon, including professionalizing and institutionalizing the business, adding deep industry experience, enabling R&D and sales investments and facilitating partnerships with new-age cloud contact center players,” said Avnish Mehra, senior MD and Co-Head, private equity at Everstone Capital.
In November 2014, Everstone, along with US-based private equity firm Solmark LLC, had invested Rs 403 crore in Servion. The fund returned in May 2017 to infuse additional fund into the business.
“Across industries, enterprises are challenged by antiquated customer engagement technology, making it difficult to react to shifting consumer preferences and growing compliance burdens. Acqueon offers a modern, omnichannel customer engagement platform that is compatible with existing contact center technology and helps clients orchestrate effective, compliant customer engagement campaign,” said Andrew Cedar, principal at Long Ridge.
Acqueon has over 200 enterprise customers across financial services & banking, healthcare, retail & distribution. The firm claims that its real-time agent guidance and coaching technology drives increased customer conversion and revenue capture while optimizing agent productivity and contact center efficiency.
PE funds, both local and global, have been aggressively chasing IT and ITeS bets, especially digital product engineering services. The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) has pegged India’s engineering R&D sector to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13% to $65 billion by 2025, up from $31 billion in 2019.
In recent past, another homegrown private equity fund Kedaara Capital has struck back-to-back deals in IT services category. It had bought out a majority stake in GAVS Technologies Ltd, a global IT services provider with a focus on AI-led managed services and digital transformation, and Great Software Laboratory Pvt Ltd (GS Lab), a digital product engineering services company.
