Exclusive: THL to acquire Queue-It from GRO Capital as ‘agentic commerce’ grows

THL Partners has agreed to acquire Queue-It, a developer of software aimed at managing website traffic congestion, from GRO Capital, PE Hub is the first to reveal. The deal is expected to close later in the year. To learn about the deal, and the Boston-based private equity firm’s plans to grow the business, PE Hub spoke with Jordan Welu, managing director at THL.

Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, Queue-It is a cloud-based virtual waiting room for websites and applications to manage online traffic surges.

“This is both a business that is AI-defensible but also is receiving tailwinds from AI,” Welu told PE Hub. “All of our diligence suggests agentic commerce is about 24 months away.”

Agentic commerce is a form of online and mobile shopping, where autonomous AI agents act on behalf of customers and businesses to complete tasks, such as researching, comparing and buying products. For example, you could use an AI agent to buy tickets to a performance on a particular date within a certain section of the venue and for a specified price range.

Queue-It’s software takes all humans and non-humans joining a virtual queue, then ranks them in order generally based on when they’ve arrived. Queue-It also filters out bots or non-humans that have malicious intent.

“We don’t think of Queue-It as a cybersecurity business per se, but it enables key cybersecurity workflows, identifies malicious bots and blocks them from the queue or sends them to the back of the queue,” Welu said.

Founded in 2010, Queue-It’s customers cut across four different types of categories: ticketing businesses, governments, retailers and direct-to-consumer brands. Customers include Ticketmaster, Ikea, StubHub and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. About 30 percent of Queue-It’s business is in the government category, Welu said.

Under-penetrated market

THL plans on making add-on deals for the business with a global focus. “The strategy is not a consolidation strategy,” Welu said. “We wouldn’t be looking to acquire a company that is smaller or identical to Queue-It but offers additional functionality that helps with both the speed and security of these online transactions.”

Welu added there’s also the possibility of acquiring an AI-based agentic commerce-focused business over the course of THL’s hold, potentially creating a fifth vertical of customers.

In terms of organic growth, Queue-It has a US headquarters in Minneapolis and wants to expand its business in North America.

“If you talk to the CEO Jesper Essendrop or his managing team, they would say they’re still under-penetrated in North America,” Welu said. “They were clear early in the process that a North American sponsor would be interesting, both to help them continue to build out their team here, and engage with our operations group to help optimize their go-to-market strategy, particularly in North America.”

As Queue-It continues to prepare for agentic commerce, it is working on integrating with its cybersecurity partners, which are both standalone private companies and very large publicly traded hyper-scalers, and content delivery networks.

AI defensibility

AI has altered how PE firms evaluate potential targets in the tech sector. Previously, top-of-mind topics were market size and retention rate, Welu explained.

“Those are still important, but they’re superseded by if a software business (and the technology that it provides) will be eliminated by a large language model or by an AI-first company,” he added. “That defensibility is the first point of diligence that we do.”

THL also has its own proprietary model that uses LLMs to assess the AI defensibility of potential targets, Welu pointed out.

The Queue-It deal is THL’s second investment out of THL Automation Fund II, which targets majority investments in automation-driven businesses with strong growth and demonstrated profitability. The first deal was the acquisition of RepScrubs in July, Welu told PE Hub. Based in Sanford, Florida, RepScrubs is an automated provider of attire to perioperative vendors at hospitals.