In its largest acquisition ever, British tech giant Sage Group has agreed to buy Silicon Valley software developer Intacct for $850 million to expand its cloud-based financial management offerings.
Intacct competes with the likes of FinancialForce and Oracle’s NetSuite in the enterprise resource planning software space. It posted revenue of $88 million for the fiscal year ended in June, more than 90% of which was subscription-based.
Sage, the world’s largest largest provider of software for small businesses, said the deal would strengthen its “position as providing the first and last cloud financial management solution a customer will ever need from start-up to global enterprise.”
“The acquisition of Intacct supports our ambitions for accelerating growth by winning new customers at scale and builds on our other cloud-first acquisitions, strengthening the Sage Business Cloud,” Sage CEO Stephen Kelly said in a news release.
Since 2000, San Jose-based Intacct had raised more than $130 million in equity funding from investors including Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and Emergence Capital. Its most recent funding round in early 2014 valued the company at $211 million.
According to Diginomica, Intacct was “one of the earliest of the pure play cloud financial management vendors” and has enjoyed something of a turnaround after struggling in the mid-2000s, posting 34% year-on-year growth in bookings.
“Intacct is at the scale where they could be a public company today, but instead chose to partner with Sage given the nature of the deal, and the opportunity to have a broader impact together,” Byron Deeter, a partner at Bessemer Venture, told TechCrunch.
The Financial Times said Sage had been seeking a “significant acquisition in recent years as it has come under pressure from cloud-based rivals targeting the small-business market.” Kelly told analysts in a conference call that the deal will help Sage achieve better brand positioning in the U.S., where it has been overshadowed by market leader Intuit.
In other acquisitions this year, Sage paid undisclosed amounts for analytics company Compass and cloud human capital management provider Fairsail.