PE Deals

Hg more than doubles money with Transporeon exit

Trimble, an industrial technology company, is the fourth strategic buyer on an Hg exit in the last 12 months.

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  • Hg’s exit values Transporeon at €1.88bn
  • Transporeon’s platform is used by 1,400 companies moving freight and nearly 145,000 carriers
  • TPG Capital sold Transporeon to Hg in January 2019 for around $800m

Hg has agreed to sell cloud-based transportation management software platform Transporeon to Trimble in a deal that gave the company an enterprise value of €1.88 billion – more than double that of Hg’s original investment.

Transporeon operates an SaaS platform that is used by 1,400 companies moving freight and nearly 145,000 carriers. Its users account for €48 billion of annual freight. It is headquartered in Ulm, Germany.

TPG Capital sold Transporeon to Hg in January 2019 for around $800 million. Hg had engaged with the Transporeon team for almost a decade before investing. Since then, Transporeon has enjoyed “strong growth and continued margin expansion across various cycles”, according to a statement, and has had five strategic tuck-in acquisitions.

“We tracked Transporeon for many years, impressed with its globally unique logistics network, solving real supply chain issues in a heavily under-digitised sector,” said Stefan Margolis, partner at Hg, in the statement. “We’re particularly proud to have enabled several new solutions which have proved immensely valuable to customers and the wider global community, like AI-based analytics and prediction tools to facilitate carbon footprint reduction, whilst also expanding our addressable sector via strategic acquisitions.”

Hg is a software and services focused investment firm with over $55 billion in assets under management. It is based in London, Munich, New York, Paris and San Francisco.

The sale, expected to close in the first half of 2023, is the fourth full exit Hg has made to a strategic buyer in the last 12 months, following the sale of Medifox to Resmed, Allocate Software to RL Datix and itm8, which merged with AddPro. It is Hg’s 15th exit in total in 2022.

This year’s exits have returned $7 billion to Hg clients, two-thirds of what the firm raised across its Mercury 3, Genesis 9 and Saturn 2 funds in 2020. The firm’s Genesis 8 fund – which holds Transporeon – has a DPI of 1.8x after less than five years and is valued at 3.2x MOIC, while the Mercury 2 fund has a DPI of 1.5x after five years. Hg’s 2012/2013 funds are almost wholly realised at over 3x.

Trimble is an industrial technology company headquartered in Westminster, Colorado.