Advent International has agreed to make a strategic investment in Conservice, a provider of software used by property owners and managers for utility management and billing.
Advent will join TA Associates – which first invested in the company in 2016 – as an institutional shareholder in the business. The company’s management also remain as investors with founder and CEO David Jenkins as the largest non-institutional investor.
“It is a pleasure to welcome Advent as an investor in Conservice alongside TA Associates,” said Mr. Jenkins. “This new investment will support our efforts to continue investing in and growing our portfolio of market-leading products. Advent and TA are committed to partnering with management teams with the aim of delivering continued, profitable growth. We look forward to working closely with both firms, helping property managers, owners and tenants profitably streamline the utility billing and payments process, with the goal of further growing Conservice in the US and internationally.”
Conservice sells its software products to single-unit and multi-unit apartment communities, student housing, military housing, government-subsidized housing, commercial buildings, homeowner associations and real estate-owned (REO) units. Conservice’s products are used to manage billing, metering, and resident payments and help reduce operating costs, ensure correct allocation of utility fees among residents, and lower energy consumption.
Conservice was founded in 2000 and is headquartered near Logan in River Heights, Utah, with additional offices in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, South Carolina, Texas, Washington and Toronto.
“We believe Conservice has unparalleled expertise in the highly complicated regulatory area of utility billing. We were particularly impressed with Conservice’s Utility Management Platform, a proprietary software platform that codifies and automates the constant regulatory changes across state and local jurisdictions, which enables Conservice to have industry-leading accuracy,” said Eric Wei, a managing director at Advent.
Advent International invests in companies active in business and financial services; healthcare; industrial; retail, consumer and leisure; and technology, media and telecom. The firm has 15 offices in 12 countries and employs 195 investment professionals across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in Boston, Advent has $57 billion in assets under management and has completed more than 350 private equity transactions.
“We see an opportunity for Conservice to utilize its industry-leading platform to continue pursuing a number of exciting growth avenues, including providing utility management to the commercial end market, enabling payments workflows, and serving as the acquirer of choice for smaller providers of utility billing management,” said Ashwin Krishnan, a principal at Advent. “These are areas where Advent has deep experience, and we look forward to working with management and TA Associates to continue expanding Conservice’s platform and delivering value to its customers.”
TA Associates makes equity investments of $75 million to $500 million in middle-market growth companies that are active in technology, healthcare, financial services, consumer and business services. In April 2019, TA held a first, final, and hard cap closing of its thirteenth fund, TA XIII LP, with total capital commitments of $8.5 billion. The firm was founded in 1968 and has more than 85 investment professionals with offices in Boston, Menlo Park, London, Mumbai and Hong Kong.
© 2020 Private Equity Professional | March 25, 2020
