Resurgens portfolio biz agrees offer for listed UK tech company

US private equity’s interest in UK listed companies just keeps coming. This time it’s a portfolio company of Resurgens Technology Partners agreeing an offer for a tech company that gives a premium a bit larger than those we’ve seen on other tech take-privates in the last few months.

In other public-to-private news, Alchemy Copyrights’ offer for Round Hill Music Royalty Fund is complete.

We’ve then got some figures from Datasite suggesting that dealflow will be “slow but steady” going into the first quarter of next year.

And speaking of slow but steady, while sources still say the exit market is pretty turgid, we’ve got Blackstone selling part of its stake in a hotel chain and Intermediate Capital Group agreeing a sale of a tech consultancy business.

Software transfer

Yet another US private equity firm is making a play for a UK-listed company. This time it’s Resurgens Technology Partners portfolio company Wellspring Worldwide looking to buy Sopheon – and it’s offering a fairly chunky premium to do so.

The boards of the companies have agreed an offer of £10 per share, which would value Sopheon’s total capital at around £114.9 million ($139.6 million; €132.2 million).

That’s a premium of 104 percent to the closing price before the announcement, 80 percent over the last three months’ average and 72 percent over the last six months.

Sopheon is a tech company that provides what it calls “innovation management software”, which helps “customers achieve increased growth, mitigate new product risk, gain competitive advantage, and improve profitability”. Its headquarters are in Surrey in the UK, and it also has a presence in Germany, the Netherlands, the US and Australia.

Wellspring designs software and data systems for managing technology transfer, intellectual property and innovation activities. It is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with offices in the UK and Japan.

King & Spalding International is legal adviser to Resurgens and Wellspring, while Squire Patton Boggs is advising Sopheon.

Cavendish Capital Markets is financial adviser to Sopheon, while Raymond James is representing Resurgens and Wellspring.

Sounding out

Sticking with public-to-privates for the moment, and Alchemy Copyrights’ take-private of Round Hill Music Royalty Fund, a Guernsey-registered and UK-listed company that owns the rights to music by a string of household name pop stars, is complete after the company was delisted this morning.

Shareholders had voted in favour of the deal earlier in October.

You can read details of the take-private offer in our coverage back in September.

Slow going

There’s going to be “slow but steady” dealflow going into the first quarter of 2024, according to figures from Datasite, a virtual data room operator.

Deal kick-offs – defined as the day a new sellside data room is created in one of Datasite’s systems – moved up a point from the same time as last year, the figures said.

Looking at EMEA specifically, kick-offs “swelled in Q3, boosted by strategic buyers with cash to burn”. Datasite expects many of those deals to close by Q4 or Q1 next year, as they are “smaller and simpler in scale”.

Checking out

Despite a slow exit market, private equity firms are still finding buyers, including some big names.

Blackstone has sold a stake of around 35 percent in Hotel Investment Partners (HIP), an owner of resort hotels in Southern Europe, to GIC.

Blackstone will continue to be a majority shareholder in HIP, with around 65 percent ownership of the company.

Barcelona-based HIP was founded in 2015. It has a portfolio of 72 hotels across Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal.

Blackstone acquired HIP in 2017. Since then, HIP has pursued an acquisition and repositioning strategy for under-invested hotels, investing over €600 million of capital into the platform, according to a release.

Megatrends

Intermediate Capital Group has agreed to sell 6point6, a technology consultancy company, to Accenture.

6point6 provides services across the UK central government, defence and security sectors, as well as the financial services industry and parts of the private sector operating critical infrastructure. It has offices in London and Manchester.

ICG invested in 6point6 in 2021. 6point6’s revenue grew by 45 percent per annum and headcount more than doubled to almost 400 employees during ICG’s investment period.

“6point6’s strategy was anchored around megatrends such as cyber and data architecture which we believed would offer structural growth tailwinds for our investment cycle and beyond,” said Liam McGivern, managing director at ICG European Mid-Market.