Livingbridge investee FluidOne discusses M&A ambitions following strong year end results
6 · Nov ·2019
Congratulations to FluidOne following a record year of growth including the expansion of funding options for M&A activity.
- Organic revenue grew 11% year-on-year from £26.0m to £28.8m.
- Underlying EBITDA up by 33% from £2.4m to £3.2m.
- We invested to accelerate growth in February 2019.
- Material flexible tiered debt facility secured from a leading bank to fund M&A strategy.
- 96% customer retention achieved as FluidOne achieves highest NPS in the industry.
FluidOne has announced strong results for the year ending 31 March 2019 as the company continued to scale following our investment earlier in 2019, as well as the agreement of a new tiered debt facility.
FluidOne provides a range of quality data connectivity services to UK businesses with particular strengths for multi-site customers as their market-leading breadth of over 30 carriers and suppliers give the best choice per location. The business helps its diverse and loyal customer base to securely connect any device to business-related data and applications through its unique, integrated software-defined network, called Platform One.
Livingbridge investment
In February 2019, Livingbridge invested in FluidOne in order to use their extensive experience and successful track record of growing technology companies to support the management team. Livingbridge will be working alongside the management team, led by CEO Russell Horton, to significantly scale the company both organically and through acquisitions.
Acquisition firepower strengthened through new bank debt facility
FluidOne has maintained the momentum in 2019 through expanding its range of funding options to support its ambitious acquisition plans by agreeing on a material new debt facility with a leading bank. FluidOne is building a strong M&A pipeline in a growing market that is poised for consolidation.
Sector leading customer experience
FluidOne underlined its commitment to be the best quality data connectivity provider to UK businesses by implementing a wide number of improvements to its proposition over 2019. This resulted in its Net Promoter Score (NPS) increasing from 35 in 2018 to a market-leading 75 as at September 2019.
Award-winning corporate culture
FluidOne is committed to building a great staff culture and believes this is a cornerstone of its success and future growth. In 2019 FluidOne was ranked 32nd in the Best Companies to Work For in London and achieved Investors in People silver accreditation.
Russell Horton, Chief Executive of FluidOne said:
“This is a strong set of results reflecting the success we’ve had in the past year in growing our customer base, improving our market-leading technology platform and putting ourselves in pole position to scale up the company as the market for network connectivity across fibre, copper, IoT, cloud and mobile continues to expand. Livingbridge’s decision to invest in FluidOne alongside the management team has had a transformative impact on our ability to build market share in a fast-growing market. We look forward to continuing to execute our ambitious growth plans over the coming months.”
Matthew Caffrey, Partner at Livingbridge, added:
“FluidOne has posted a strong set of results and has continued to make excellent progress in the months following our investment in February this year. The new debt facility, coupled with our financial support, provides FluidOne with the acquisition funding required to support its ambitious growth plans. The company is perfectly positioned to attract other high-quality players to its scalable technology platform and take a leading role in consolidating a highly fragmented market that is rich in opportunity as companies accelerate their digital transformation journeys.”
FluidOne is currently number one for multi-site connectivity as one of the most connected network aggregators in the UK. The delivery of its products and services is based upon Platform One, which won the Queens Award for Enterprise: Innovation. Platform One is a software-defined national fibre network, based upon 19 data centre pops, blending the services of 30 different asset-owning communications providers with their in house developed Dash portal, into one ready to compare, quote, order and ready to use national service.
About FluidOne:
Established in 2006, London based FluidOne are a communications service integrator, serving the connectivity needs of thousands of business customers and several hundred managed service partners. FluidOne’s national fibre network, Platform One, interconnects the wholesale services of every leading cloud service, datacentre, mobile operator, broadband supplier, fixed line operator and telephony service provider into a common service network, creating a single platform of pre-integrated services. FluidOne’s DASH customer portal makes these aggregated services easy to compare, easy to choose, easy to consume, flexible in use and as powerful and reliable as each customer requires.
www.fluidone.com | contact@fluidone.com
Press contact: Sanita Karra Marketing sanitakarra@fluidone.com 020 7135 6754