Current
Commitment:
£25m
Date of investment:
2019
Sector:
Data & Analytics
Buy & Build:
6 Completed Acquisitions
“Horizon Capital has a proven track record of building quality, high growth technology service businesses and I am looking forward to developing Ascent in partnership with them.”
Stewart SmytheCEO, Ascent
Background
Ascent is a UK-headquartered digital transformation business specialising in data engineering, business intelligence, advanced analytics, data science, software product development, and IoT solutions. With global delivery, Ascent serves mid-market and enterprise clients across a range of private and public sector clients
The outsourced data analytics and custom software development market is growing rapidly and is extremely fragmented across Europe with Ascent well positioned to grow both organically and via acquisition. Horizon Capital have worked with both existing and incoming management to refine a growth strategy, identify and execute on acquisitions and provide the required capital for accelerated growth.
The Journey so far
Horizon Capital worked closely with the founding management team to develop a vision for a pan European data, analytics and software development business any for 12 months before investing.
Since our investment in 2019, Ascent has completed three acquisitions. This has deepened the data analytics capability, broadened the client base and enabled the business to expand into new geographies.
In that time we have also worked closely with the business to build out the management team and invest in the go to market and sales engine. We have also worked with the CFO to implement new ERP and CRM systems to create a business that can rapidly scale.
Buy and Build
Ascent has completed six acquisitions across UK, Bulgaria, Portugal and Germany, all sourced from our market mapping programme. Further international and UK acquisitions are under review.