The main event of our February webinar was an all-star private equity panel with representatives from ACCEL KKR, The Carlyle Group, and Riverside Company. Here are a few of the insights they shared with us.
From Michael Wand, of Carlyle, "Our ticket size is somewhere between $15M and $50M. We invest in TMT companies across the main geographies in Europe, mainly to guide them through some sort of transformation. Often we pick them up when they are founder-run and are looking for acquisitions or changes in their applications areas, business models, or obviously also further geographic growth toward the US and particularly to Asia.
Our portfolio is TMT oriented, and within TMT I would say 70% currently is in software. You heard about UC4 earlier, which was one of our companies. We groomed them for about five years and sold them last year."
From Rob Palumbo, of ACCEL KKR, "Im sure its similar for my colleagues. A lot of the businesses we are investing in, they are actually looking to us to either execute on a more global strategy because they have a footprint in North America and want to get into other markets, or alternatively they are outside the US and we have a business like that in Australia and one in Europe, and theyre trying to get into the US market and hoping we can help them with that. Most businesses, especially software businesses of a modest size, are thinking globally these days, and they have looked to their partners to help them execute that strategy."
Finally, from Dave Tiley of Riverside, "We have four funds. We have a larger fund, if you will, for larger companies, that is $5M EBITDA minimum. We have an Asia fund, a European fund, and an RNCF fund, which is the micro cap; well do deals as small as $1M EBITDA. Our market focus has really been on healthcare, training and franchising. Over the last five years, though, weve really seen that shift. Healthcare will always be a strong focus for us, but we really build a software practice, and now a consumer products practice as well.
We've got a really heavy operating model, and that has been tremendous support for the side companies that we work with. Again, what were interested in for our investors, we tell them that its a 5-7 year hold, so theyre very patient, to give the time to really go to work and try to work together with the management team to really build the companies, although we do see that our hottest companies are certainly going much quicker than that."