Bain Capital’s Rocket Software brings in BOS

It’s a tech-heavy Thursday as we have a couple of new deals to report and we take a deeper look at a recent add-on.

First up, Bain Capital portfolio company Rocket Software has brought in a German software company.

Next, DTCP has announced the sale of one of its portfolio companies, enterprise architecture management software provider LeanIX.

Finally on the tech front, Nina Lindholm gets the inside story from Thoma Bravo’s Hudson Smith about the firm’s portfolio company Magnet Forensics acquiring digital media forensics company Griffeye.

We then round things out with a couple of deep dives into the two infra fund manager deals this week – CVC’s tie-up with DIF and the deal between Bridgepoint and Energy Capital Partners.

Tech charge

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to Joanne Yuan, partner, investments, at B2B software investor Turn/River Capital about how despite her firm’s Silicon Valley home, they are a big fan of European tech companies – with the continent having many overlooked “gems”.

Bain Capital-backed Rocket Software seems to agree, as it has acquired BOS, a German provider of data integration services.

Readers will remember that Rocket had also been interested in another German tech business, Software AG, although it dropped its pursuit of the listed company in June and sold its stake to fellow suitor Silver Lake.

Switching back to the BOS deal, and its flagship product tcVISION will now be known as Rocket Data Replicate and Sync.

The combination of the two companies’ products will also make “training generative artificial intelligence models easier by leveraging a business’ mainframe data”, the release said.

Exit

Sticking with AI for a moment, and DTCP has agreed to sell LeanIX, an enterprise architecture management software provider, to German software giant SAP.

The LeanIX acquisition will give SAP’s customers access to tools used for business transformation and AI-enabled process optimisation, according to a release.

Echoing the comments from Turn/River’s Yuan, Thomas Preuss, managing partner at DTCP, said: “The transaction is a great indicator that Europe is catching the US when it comes to product and quality of Enterprise SaaS businesses. In Europe, we are seeing third-generation investors and entrepreneurs coming through the ecosystem, building category leading businesses in tech hubs that now rival those in the US.”

Forensics

The need for tools to analyse and filter the “exploding” amounts of data used in criminal cases provided a compelling growth story for Thoma Bravo‘s add-on acquisition Griffeye, partner Hudson Smith told PE Hub Europe’s Nina Lindholm.

Magnet Forensics, a portfolio company of Thoma Bravo, acquired Griffeye, a digital media forensics software company, in late August. Police agencies use Gothenburg-based Griffeye’s software to analyse large volumes of images and videos.

“The amount of data is exploding, causing the backlog to increase, especially as some places haven’t yet embraced this type of software,” said Smith.

Around 90 percent of cases involve digital evidence, according to Smith. “There is an overwhelming amount of data for someone to go through, so you really need tools to help analyse and filter through the data to get the insights quickly.”

Read the full article to learn about how Thoma Bravo plans to grow the combined businesses.

Infra penny, infra pound

There’s been a little burst of infrastructure fund manager acquisitions this week, with CVC Capital Partners buying a majority stake in DIF Capital Partners and Bridgepoint acquiring Energy Capital Partners.

Our colleague Anne-Louise Stranne Petersen over at Infrastructure Investor has taken an in-depth look at each. Here’s her coverage of the CVC and DIF tie-up and her piece on Bridgepoint and ECP’s deal.