Insurance, healthcare and energy metering deals round out the week; A&D in focus in They Said It

Morning all, Craig McGlashan here filling in for Nina Lindholm on the Europe Wire.

We’re doing a roundup of some the deals announced late in the week, touching on areas like insurance, healthcare and energy metering.

We finish the week with They Said It, which touches on the aerospace and defense industry today.

Insurance play

Bridgepoint Growth has completed a majority investment in VIPR Solutions.

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in London, VIPR facilitates the exchange of program business data in the insurance market. It aims to help process bordereaux, the data files that managing general agents, cover holders, brokers, fronting carriers, reinsurers and third-party administrators rely on to record risks, premiums and claims.

The platform processes around 500,000 bordereaux annually, representing about $12 billion of gross written premium, across a base of blue-chip customers.

“VIPR has built a differentiated and defensible position at the center of a large, structurally growing and under-penetrated market,” said Mayank Kanga, partner at Bridgepoint, in a statement. “The company combines deep insurance domain expertise, mission-critical technology and an embedded role in its customers’ workflows.”

Over the past decade, VIPR has grown from a single bordereaux-processing tool into an end-to-end data and workflow platform that increasingly acts as the market’s system of record, according to the statement. Its domain expertise, accumulated data and integration into customer workflows have made it the recognized leader in its field, the company said.

Bridgepoint’s investment will fund continued development of VIPR’s platform and product roadmap, scale its AI capabilities and support further international expansion, drawing on Bridgepoint’s experience scaling high-growth, profitable data technology businesses.

VIPR’s existing sponsor, Tenzing, a growth equity investor specializing in tech and tech-enabled businesses across the UK and Europe, will fully exit the business under the deal. Co-founder and chief executive Paul Templar and the wider management team will reinvest alongside Bridgepoint and continue to lead VIPR.

Editor’s note: Bridgepoint owns PEI Group, the publisher of PE Hub.

Minority exit

KKR has agreed to sell its 10 percent minority stake in Nordic Bioscience to the Danish biotechnology company’s founder and majority shareholder Claus Christiansen.

Based in Herlev, Nordic Bioscience develops blood-based biomarkers that detect diseases or injuries based on changes in extracellular matrix structures. It has a broad patented ECM portfolio of over 150 biomarkers for conditions such as liver disease, cancer and obesity, and has published over 850 scientific papers.

KKR invested in the business in 2021 through its health care strategic growth strategy. Under the PE firm, the company expanded its capabilities across R&D services, clinical diagnostics and drug development, said Kugan Sathiyanandarajah, partner and head of KKR’s European healthcare private equity and healthcare strategic growth teams, in a statement.

The company doubled revenue over the period, according to the statement.

On the meter

Energy providers are increasingly offering “smart” tariffs that can reward consumers with lower prices if they push their energy use outside peak times, for instance. It’s a big part of pushing countries towards more efficient energy use.

The meters for such tariffs need to be just as “smart.” That’s the focus of another deal this week.

Magnesium Capital has agreed to acquire a majority stake in TMA, a provider of end-to-end metering and energy data management services headquartered in London.

Established in 1987, TMA provides metering and energy data services across more than 8.5 million electricity meter points in Great Britain and supports many of the market’s leading suppliers, third-party intermediaries and corporate customers, according to a press statement.

The company’s integrated NexFlow platform and end-to-end service offering help customers improve billing accuracy, settlement performance and regulatory compliance, actively supporting its customers through the transition to Market-wide Half-Hourly Settlement (MHHS).

Trusted half-hourly data is increasingly critical to developing innovative time-of-use tariffs, improving customer billing, supporting flexibility services, electric vehicle charging, low carbon technologies and other innovations that will shape the future energy market, the statement added.

Italian expansion

Elvaston portfolio company Leading Hospitality Solutions has acquired a majority stake in Edita, an Italian digital solutions provider for hotels, through its marketing tech platform Brandnamic Unlimited.

Edita, founded and headquartered in Rimini, helps independent hotels and hotel groups increase their digital visibility and strengthen direct booking channels. Its offering includes digital marketing solutions, CRM tools, booking technology, AI-based applications for optimizing guest communication and digital processes, and hotel websites.

The acquisition supports LHS’s strategy of building a pan-European hospitality technology ecosystem with a strong local presence in key markets, the company said. LHS is part of Elvaston’s Hospitality Technology portfolio, which invests in software companies driving digital transformation in the hospitality sector.

They Said It

The aerospace and defense sector has been a hot topic for private equity firms over the last few years. That drew my eye to this comment by John Prairie, a partner at the law firm Mayer Brown, in an interview with PE Hub’s Obey Martin Manayiti about proposed new rules on what constitutes a “small” business in the US:

“For smaller PE firms that are focusing on the aerospace and defense industries, for example, there is going to be some interesting strategic opportunities to come in and combine companies with complementary capabilities and put them together to still have a combined company that qualifies as small.”

That’s all from me today. John R Fischer is in the US chair later today and Nina Lindholm will write to you from London on Monday.

Cheers,

Craig