Beech Tree Private Equity today announces an investment in Ancoris, the pure-play Google Cloud expert. With its plans to scale up investments in Sales & Marketing and Development, the partnership will provide funds and expertise to accelerate the company’s growth, responding to growing customer demand for its skills and capabilities. Ancoris will also assess M&A to build out specific incremental capabilities.
Founded by David McLeman and headquartered in Bracknell, Reading, Ancoris has extensive expertise in Google Cloud technologies, and delivers its magic through Data and AI, as well as modernisation of applications, infrastructure, and workspaces. During its 10+ years as a pure-play Google Cloud partner, Ancoris has developed valuable IP, which helps its customers accelerate their cloud adoption journey, and in turn realise value faster. Most recently, the company started packaging some of its solutions in the form of “Labs”, which are aimed at specific challenges of C-level executives.
The investment will further Ancoris’ capabilities in Data and AI, infrastructure, and application modernisation, as well as fund a next generation cloud managed services capability. The company will scale its operations to support long term growth, with special emphasis on its people and technical excellence. Ancoris will also look to deepen its relationship with Google to bring more value to their joint customers.
We have existing knowledge in the public cloud market, particularly with Microsoft Azure, having also invested in Transparity, a pure-play Microsoft Azure services business and are now excited to be a part of Google’s growth strategy particularly within Data Analytics & AI and Development and Managed Applications. According to industry forecasts, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 23.1% in 2021 to total $332.3bn, up from $270bn.
Ancoris has extensive cloud expertise and is led by a senior team of industry experts including the recent appointment of Andre Azevedo (ex-Cloudreach) as COO who said “At Ancoris we believe that innovation is only important when it delivers value, and quickly. We encourage our customers to think big, but to start now. We want to build the most innovative Google Cloud partner, and to do so, we need to build on our incredible team with even more great talent. And that’s what we will accelerate with this partnership with BTPE” Paul Franks and Adam Rudd from Beech Tree Private Equity will also join the board as Non-Executive Directors.
Commenting on the transaction, David McLeman, Ancoris CEO & Founder, and Paul Franks, Managing Partner of Beech Tree, said:
“We are extremely pleased to have found the right partner in Beech Tree, they have significant knowledge of our sector and scaling businesses like Ancoris. We have experienced strong growth in the last few years and this investment will allow us to respond to customer demands even quicker. From the beginning, we felt a strong cultural alignment and, being a people business, that’s incredibly important to us” David McLeman
To succeed in an increasingly fast-moving market, companies must modernise the technology that underpins their business, and use data to improve their decision-making process. Google Cloud is leading the way in data and modern infrastructure. Ancoris’s expertise, strong management team and depth of talent builds a winning combination which provides customers with tremendous business value. We were especially impressed with their 83% NPS score during our customer research, which further validated Ancoris as the right partner for us. The strong relationships they have with their customers is a testament to how Ancoris provide solutions and outcomes that really add value and change the way businesses operate” Paul Franks
Funders of the transaction:
Beech Tree Private Equity (Paul Franks, Adam Rudd, Luke Burns, Leigh Thomas)
Advisers to Beech Tree and Newco:
Financial due diligence – DSW (Ed Brentnall, Rosalind Jones, Rebecca Smith, Rob Parker, Matt Jones)
Tax due diligence – Tax Advisory Partnership (Russ Cahill, Helen Mallalieu)
Tax – PWC (Catherine McMichael, Callum Lee, Samuel Coulson)
Legal – Eversheds (Antony Walsh, Hannah Kaye, Chris Archer, Theo Watkins, Sam Jones)
Customer due diligence – The Customer Consultancy (Charlie Bantoft)
Management due diligence – i2i HQ (Michael Finnigan)
Insurance due diligence – Bollington (Ian Muldowney)
Advisers to the Company:
Corporate Finance – Alantra (James Chapman-Andrews, Simon Roberts, David Bellis, William Fenby)
Legal – Pinsents (Edward Stead, Kieran Toal, Ben Elliott, Adam Murphy, Kate Illif, Heidi Jempeji, Philip Jackson and Beatrice Leong)
Tax – Wilson Partners (Alan Ross, Nick Lloyd)
About Beech Tree PE
Beech Tree Private Equity invests £10-30m equity cheques into fast growing profitable businesses in 3 area – technology, tech-enabled services and financial services. Beech Tree then work with the management teams of these businesses to build scale and capability, bringing capital and expertise to drive these expansion strategies.
