Pemberton has provided facilities to support the full refinancing and is providing a committed acquisition facility. This will allow FluidOne to acquire multiple businesses a year going forward.
Russell Horton, CEO of FluidOne, led a management buyout in 2019 through investment from Livingbridge. Since then, FluidOne has made eight acquisitions, and the business has quadrupled in size with revenue reaching £109 million.
Horton (pictured) commented, “It gives me great pleasure to announce our new partnership with Pemberton. To support our ambitious plans, we ran a process to seek a refinance package that would give flexibility and facilities to support us over the long term.
“During this competitive process Pemberton stood out as the ideal partner given how their expert team engaged to devise a tailored package to fit our requirements and due to their track record of supporting high growth, evolving businesses.
“We have our next acquisition in process that will be the first deployment of our new facility, and a pipeline of follow-on targets that fit our connected cloud solutions strategy.”
Simon Hollingsworth, partner, Livingbridge, said, “The new debt facility provides the scale and flexibility we were seeking to support the next phase of growth for FluidOne in an exciting growth market.
“The strategy since investment with Russell and the team has been to build critical capability in the highest value, next generation product sets to make FluidOne the leading UK IT and cyber managed service provider. We now believe we have the right value add capabilities to deliver this across both customer segments and market verticals making FluidOne a high quality and differentiated business.”
Richard Meehan, managing director, origination, Pemberton, added, “We are delighted to be partnering with the FluidOne team and Livingbridge on this transaction. Russell and his team have built an exceptional platform across both product capability and customer service levels, translating into market leading customer satisfaction and retention rates.
“Pemberton has considerable experience in the IT services market and views the business to be ideally positioned to benefit from continued strong demand for cloud and cybersecurity services. We also look forward to helping the company execute on its ambitious acquisition strategy, with a number of near-term targets already well progressed.”
FluidOne combines IT and cybersecurity, with connectivity and communications to provide customers with connected cloud solutions that allow their staff to work securely from anywhere.