Kartesia, the European specialist provider of capital solutions for small and mid-sized companies, is pleased to announce that it has provided a financing solution to mid-market private equity firm Palatine Private Equity (“Palatine”) for its acquisition of a majority stake in Manchester-headquartered digital transformation and customer experience specialist FourNet.  

Founded in 2005, FourNet offers contact centre and unified communication solutions primarily to government departments and other public sector enterprises. The business model is based on utilising its base of experienced and qualified staff (along with some vendor outsourcing) to provide a high quality implementation service to the end client, as well as ongoing support once an implementation project has been undertaken (through managed services and software assurance). Reflecting its strong three-year growth rate of nearly 55 per cent, FourNet featured in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 for 2020, the index of the 100 privately-owned technology companies with the fastest-growing sales. The company has won a string of awards in recent years and has also been acknowledged as one of the Best Tech Companies to work for in Britain.  

Palatine has previous experience of high-quality, successful investments in the sector with portfolio companies Acora, XLN and Selection Services. 

Kartesia’s facility proceeds will be supporting Palatine Private Equity with its purchase of FourNet and marks another successful transaction in the cloud-centric services sector for Kartesia’s senior debt fund (KSO I) in the UK. Last month, Kartesia provided a £30m credit facility to finance the acquisition of cloudThing by Kerv and in August 2020, invested €29m in leading pan-European telecommunications provider Firstcom Europe via a senior loan facility. The deal team at Kartesia comprised Nick Holman and Karan Patole. 

Nick Holman, Director at Kartesia, commented: “We are excited to support Palatine in the acquisition of FourNet, a business which has established an excellent reputation for itself in a sector which has excellent growth prospects. FourNet’s use of managed services and software assurance, coupled with highly competent and experienced employees, means it is well-placed to capitalise on the accelerating shift to cloud-centric services. We are very familiar with this sector through previous transactions, particularly our support of the recent transformative acquisition of cloudThing by Kerv, and look forward to bringing this expertise to bear as the business executes its growth strategy.”