Founded in 1998 by Lawrence Jones MBE and Gail Jones, Manchester-based UKFast has grown to become the UK’s largest privately-owned hosting provider. UKFast offers cloud and hosting platforms for businesses and government organisations to outsource their critical IT infrastructure. UKFast recently ventured into public cloud providing integration and support for AWS and Azure through a new division, ClearCloud.
UKFast will continue to be majority owned and led by the founder management team. The team was drawn to Inflexion’s experience in supporting technology businesses, local Manchester office and track record of successful IPOs.
Inflexion is backing UKFast’s growth in an IT infrastructure services market worth around £2bn and estimated to be growing at c.nine per cent a year. UKFast’s strong growth in this market is driven by a paradigm shift from on-premise to cloud.
The GCA Altium team was led by Phil Adams and included Stuart Warriner, James Craven, Paul Lines, Mark Smith, Phil Chadwick and Rob Liguz (M&A) together with Richard Clark and Freddie Light (debt advisory).
Phil Adams, CEO at GCA Altium, said: “It was a real privilege to work with one of the UK’s top technology companies - an amazing story of pure entrepreneurship to build a business of such scale without any external investment. We are looking forward to seeing the next chapter of the journey for Lawrence, Gail and the team with their new partners at Inflexion.”