A Jacksonville-based technology company is expanding its reach in Europe, acquiring three companies that extend its product offerings and geographic reach.
With the companies that Revalize now has its its operation, it is able to work with manufacturers all the way from the point that a product is being designed up until a customer buys the item, CEO Jim Contardi said.
Among the recent acquisitions made by Revalize is Kussnacht, Switzerland-based SpecPage, which brings the Jacksonville company into the food-and-beverage manufacturing sector.
With the recently announced deals, Revalize has achieved a level that allows it to now focus on integrating a plethora of products, with the goal of giving customers one solution throughout the manufacturing process.
“The first sort of objective was to get scale, which I think we have now achieved,” Contardi said. “With that scale, we can start to create connections between the different solutions that we've acquired, so that we can take that burden off of our customers.”
Five months ago, Revalize came into being, with private equity firm TA Associates bringing five supply chain technology companies together to form the Jacksonville-headquartered business.
The company then went on an acquisition hunt, buying four companies in August and expanding into continental Europe with a purchase last month.
Last week, the company announcing the acquisition of a Swiss and two German companies and said it had picked up a “significant” minority investment from Hg, a European-focused tech fund.
The three newly acquired businesses are
- PROCAD Group, a company headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, that provides product lifecycle management and product data management tools. The company has 250 employees.
- TENADO, headquartered in Bochum, Germany, which makes computer-aided design software for several industries, with 30,000 active users ranging from metal and wood fabrication trades to traffic management.
- SpecPage, which develops product lifecycle management and quality assurance solutions for the food and beverage sector.
The European expansion is part of the growth strategy laid out when the company was formed.
“What we believe is an unmet need in the marketplace is a provider at scale to provide solutions to multinational manufacturers,” Contardi said. “There's many manufacturers in the U.S. that do business in Europe, many European manufacturers that do business in the U.S., and they'd like to have a set of solutions that they can count on wherever they are.”
With the acquisitions, about half of the company’s business is in Europe. The new deals also accelerate revenue growth, with the company almost doubling its planned revenue objectives for the first year of operations.
While the acquisitions bring in new customers, several of the businesses have overlapping user bases, Contardi said — which creates an opportunity.
“What that tells us is manufacturing customers have had to be their own systems integrator, which really isn't the business they want to be in,” he said. “They want to be in the business of manufacturing.”
Creating a streamlined solution from the various products is being done on a base of investment Revalize has made in its internal systems, the CEO said, allowing it to functionally integrate the 15 businesses it now has.
“Despite the fact that there are people that speak different languages, and come from different cultures, from a software business perspective, we all sort of think about the world similarly,” he said. “And so it's actually not that difficult to achieve, sort of bringing the companies together and in a fairly short period of time.”
For Jacksonville, that will mean adding more roles in the home office.
“I think that's positive for the Jacksonville tech scene,” Contardi said, “and the economy.”
At the moment, the company is looking to fill a few dozen positions, according to online job ads, with the bulk of them in Jacksonville.
