FluidOne agrees long term refinancing agreement with Pemberton to fuel ambitious growth plans

FluidOne, the market-leading provider of Connected Cloud Solutions, announced today that it has agreed a long-term refinancing package with Pemberton Asset Management (Pemberton) to fuel its ambitious plans to treble in size over the next five years.

Pemberton has provided facilities to support the full refinancing and is providing a committed acquisition facility. This will provide funding for future strategic add-on acquisitions and support FluidOne’s plans to acquire multiple businesses a year going forward.

Since investment from Livingbridge in 2019, supporting an MBO led by CEO Russell Horton, the business has quadrupled in size with revenue growing to £109m on the back of eight acquisitions whilst delivering world class customer service (NPS 89). The acquisition strategy has pivoted the business to be one of the UK’s leading IT and Cyber Security-led managed service providers with over 50% IT and cyber revenue mix and recurring revenues of over 70%. FluidOne combines IT and Cyber, with Connectivity and Communications to provide customers with Connected Cloud Solutions enabling their staff to work from anywhere, simply, and securely.

Commenting on the news Russell Horton, FluidOne CEO, said:

“It gives me great pleasure to announce our new partnership with Pemberton. To support our ambitious plans, we ran a process to seek a refinance package that would give flexibility and facilities to support us over the long term. During this competitive process Pemberton stood out as the ideal partner given how their expert team engaged to devise a tailored package to fit our requirements and due to their track record of supporting high growth, evolving businesses. We have our next acquisition in process that will be the first deployment of our new facility, and a pipeline of follow-on targets that fit our Connected Cloud Solutions strategy.”

Simon Hollingsworth, Partner at Livingbridge, said:

“The new debt facility provides the scale and flexibility we were seeking to support the next phase of growth for FluidOne in an exciting growth market. The strategy since investment with Russell and the team has been to build critical capability in the highest value, next generation product sets to make FluidOne the leading UK IT and Cyber managed service provider. We now believe we have the right value add capabilities to deliver this across both customer segments and market verticals making FluidOne a high quality and differentiated business. “

Richard Meehan, Managing Director, Origination at Pemberton, said:

“We are delighted to be partnering with the FluidOne team and Livingbridge on this transaction. Russell and his team have built an exceptional platform across both product capability and customer service levels, translating into market leading customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Pemberton has considerable experience in the I.T. services market and view the business to be ideally positioned to benefit from continued strong demand for cloud and cyber security services. We also look forward to helping the Company execute on its ambitious acquisition strategy, with a number of near-term targets already well progressed.”

Based upon recent research commissioned by FluidOne, it is operating in a UK business customer market that spends £36bn a year on IT, Cyber and Communications, with a sweet spot for FluidOne services in the 100-2500 employee space that is forecast to grow 8.8% over the next four years. FluidOne is providing critical services in areas of high demand, particularly driven by digital transformation continuing the move of IT and voice applications to the cloud, where customers need trusted advice, high quality technical support, modernised IT, cyber security, business intelligence, and advanced connectivity.

Advice on the debt refinancing was provided by Clearwater.