The acquisition last week of SPS (formerly Sutton Place Strategies) by the UK financial information and events firm With Intelligence (With) is significant. And not just because it’s the third deal in the 18 months since its own acquisition by Motive Partners which valued the business at £410mn – up from £135mn in 2020. It is thought With has paid Bain & Company £25-30mn (c3x revenue) for the provider of private equity M&A deals and analytics.
More significant is that SPS, which had been acquired by Bain in 2020, propels the 26-year-old, UK-based With into the private equity deals space for the first time, in line with its much bigger rivals, Preqin and Pitchbook. It had previously stayed away from covering pe deals, preferring to focus on providing fund-raising data and insight for hedge and private markets fund managers.
However, it had become clear that With was potentially losing out on business from pe firms who would prefer to buy their fund-raising and deals data from a single source. Moreover, the company believes the deals data will make it more attractive to allocators who are increasingly using the With platform to inform their investment decisions. The SPS data should enable allocators to build a more granular view of funds to ensure they do what they say they do.
Focused primarily on private markets, SPS has transaction-level data on 100,000+ tracked deals. Together with Bain’s unique industry taxonomy which With has licensed as part of the deal, it helps subscribers to unify the fragmented deal sourcing environment and gives firms greater transparency of the deals most relevant to their investment strategy.
In the short term, With will be seeking to cross-sell its platform with SPS’s customer base, where there is currently very little overlap, and vice versa. SPS has annual sales of £8-10mn and some 150 subscribers. Over the past few years, With has proved to be very adept at cross-selling customers from new acquisitions like Hedge Fund Alert, Eurekahedge and most recently Highworth Research, which has seen the annual value of subscriptions triple since it was acquired just six months ago, albeit from a low base.
The SPS deal is unlikely to be the last in the sector either, as With Intelligence’s CEO and founder Charlie Kerr continues his single-minded drive to create a £1bn EV business. To achieve this, the company needs to be “pure” subscriptions revenue (at least 80%, up from the current 60%), which means more organic growth, more M&A and less everything else. So we should expect to see With shedding other non-core products, which started with the divestment of Captive Review back in June. Any non-subscription activity that remains must play directly into the fund-raising and deal execution mission.
We are unlikely to see a large strategic acquisition, however, partly because there are not many appropriate targets (and what there are are very expensive) and partly because Kerr’s strategy of buying small has been incredibly successful – 10 acquisitions since 2020 have collectively brought £35mn to the overall top line which is likely to be a run-rated £100mn in the year to February 2025. The CEO sees the M&A opportunity as a sort of Rubik’s Cube, with series of pools of data, each representing different investor types, asset classes and information formats, which can be added to the core platform one by one simply and easily. And cheaply.
The transformation of With Intelligence from traditional B2B media player to financial data provider has been remarkable.
From Kerr’s light bulb moment back in 2019 when he realised the business could be worth 4-5x if it became a high-value, paid-for data provider, the company is unrecognisable today. The new name – it was plain old ‘Pageant Media’ back then – is the most obvious difference. But the change goes much deeper, with the business consciously killing off its old publishing brands, abandoning advertising and building an enterprise subscription, data and insights distribution platform which was designed to look nothing like a standard online news and insight product.
Today, With Intelligence is ‘data first’, with a relentless focus on relevance, accuracy and recency, in an industry which values these criteria more highly than scoops and exclusives – and, crucially, can afford to pay for what it wants (average customer yield is now around £20k and growing strongly). Importantly, the journalists are still there, but their changed role is now to enrich the data and make it more useful and valuable.
But, perhaps, the most profound change is in the leadership. Only the triumvirate of Kerr himself, non-executive chair, Bain’s Graham Elton, and long-term CFO, Phil O’Toole, remain in place from five years ago; the other senior executives have been changed as many as three times since then (although some of them remain in the business).
This is partly because the skills required to run a media business are completely different from those needed for a data and analytics provider. But it’s also because With Intelligence has consciously been on a journey of continuous self-improvement. It is clear that many of the current senior team, exemplified by Cornelia Andersson who was appointed as Chief Product Officer a few months ago, would never have considered joining the old business, however generous the package.
But the company’s biggest change is still ahead.
The recent appointments may signal the start of the process of changing Kerr himself. It seems implausible that With Intelligence will go into its next change of ownership with the founder still at the helm, especially if (as expected) it goes to a strategic buyer rather than private equity. After 25 years, it seems inevitable that the founder will retire from the business he had created after leaving school at 16 to sell classified ads. Newspapers recounting his rags-to-riches story usually manage to omit that he attended a swanky British boarding school. But he certainly became an entrepreneur the hard way and succeeded by bootstrapping on maxed-out credit cards what was once an advertising-funded B2B magazine publisher. Now he’s on the way, maybe, to a dream £1bn valuation.
Charlie Kerr’s departure – perhaps in a year or two – will be a shock for the people who have depended on his inspirational, if uncoventional, leadership. But there will be a few more deals before then.
Simon Middelboe is an adviser / NED to B2B information, media and events companies and a former director of With Intelligence, Centaur Media and EMAP. This is his first contribution to Flashes & Flames.
| SnapShot With Intelligence | ||||||
| Yr to Feb £mn | 2025* | 2024* | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 |
| Rev | 100 | 80 | 64 | 44 | 31 | 28 |
| UK | 20% | 20% | 23% | 22% | 100% | |
| N Am. | 65% | 63% | 57% | 58% | — | |
| Ebitda | 38 | 30 | 23 | 15 | 10 | 9 |
| Margin | 38% | 37% | 36% | 34% | 32% | 32% |
| People | 575 | 550 | 481 | 420 | 300 | 165 |
| EV | 410 | 135 | ||||
