Apparently, Bluewave Technology Group likes Louisville so much, it came back for seconds.
On Feb. 1, Bluewave — only three months removed from acquiring Louisville-based Virtual Telecomm — enlarged its footprint in the metro area with the acquisition of SinglePoint Communications Group. No financial details of the transaction have been made publicly available.
“I think it was doubling down on a lot of areas where we have some strength around our network in CCaaS (contact center as service) and UCaaS (unified communications as a service),” Bluewave founder and CEO Seth Penland told me recently in an exclusive interview. “I think it was cementing our positioning in the Louisville market. I think it’s an important hub for us — and now with Virtual Telecomm, we’re able to have real presence there and be the clear market leader and [take] care of great clients.
SinglePoint’s clientele are varied, but are highly concentrated in the health care and retail spaces. In the retail world, in particular, SinglePoint has created a technology stack that is both proven and repeatable, and “that was an area that was new to us that we didn't have that experience in," Penland continued.
SinglePoint became the 10th acquisition for Parsippany, New Jersey-based Bluewave after receiving a $75 million influx of capital in 2022 from Virginia-based Columbia Capital, which Penland told me back in the fall served two main functions: building out its executive teams and pursuing mergers and acquisitions to expand its professional services.
What is significant to note, though, is the seller itself, Soterra Capital, a private equity firm who started to create a smaller version of the technology lifecycle management portfolio (see more below) in 2021 that Bluewave has been creating since 2022.
“At the start of [2022], I don't think this was on our strategic roadmap,” said Nic Jones, the former SinglePoint president who is now working for Bluewave as the vice president of alliance partnerships and indirect channel. “We started the year really continuing our own strategy of looking for the right agencies and partners on the M&A side. And then we were going to have to also invest quite a bit of time, energy and resources into building out our operations as we continued to scale.”
Jones said, though, that roadmap began to shift when he and his team discovered that Bluewave had the same “shared DNA” — and had already started to build out the digital life cycle of services that SinglePoint (and Soterra) had envisioned.
“As we got to meet their team, there was really good alignment, just on their vision and how they value the customer outcome,” Jones said. “They [have a] client-first approach to everything that they do — and that matched our DNA … It just became pretty clear that the best strategic move for us is to lock arms with these guys, and so it wasn't a hard sell on our end.”
Penland said they were aware of SinglePoint and Soterra for about two years, given the acquisitions that they had made. Jones and Penland also knew of each other by taking part in a peer group.
Around the same time, one of Soterra’s managing partners, Jeremy Carter, had started to talk with one Columbia’s partners, Evan DeCorte, who sits on Bluewave’s board of directors (among other companies in which the firm has invested). It should be noted that Soterra is now a minority equity holder in Bluewave, following the sale.
“We saw a good alignment and then it kind of accelerated from there,” Penland said.
Where things began
SinglePoint Solutions was founded in 1999 by Corky Webb, as an IT consulting company with a focus on long-distance services.
In 2016, SinglePoint Solutions was acquired by Soterra Capital — and later served as the flagship operation, SinglePoint Communications Group, when Soterra began adding to its portfolio.
In 2021, Soterra acquired Engaged Pro, an IT agency based in Louisville; and Sky Technology Partners, an IT agency based in Wayne, New Jersey. In 2022, the firm also acquired SinglePoint Solutions of Central Kentucky, based out of Lexington, Kentucky.
SinglePoint had approximately 15 employees working in all four sectors of the company when it was acquired, all of whom will be retained as Bluewave employees — and nine of whom call the Louisville area home.
For the moment, the newly acquired employees will continue to work at the SinglePoint’s office in Middletown at 210 Townpark Circle. Penland, though, hinted at some point, the employees from the Virtual Telecomm acquisition — who are located off of South Hurstbourne Parkway south of the Forest Hills neighborhood — would eventually work under the same roof with those who have come on board from SinglePoint.
There are approximately 20 people who work for Bluewave who are based in the Louisville metro area, but that particular headcount could go up, Penland said.
Continued growth
When Bluewave acquired Virtual Telecomm in November, it had approximately 80 employees serving a little more than 2,500 clients. With the latest merger, Bluewave now has approximately 140 employees and more than 6,000 clients — and is now somewhere in the top three or four largest technology groups of its kind.
Jones is a native Louisvillian, who became president at SinglePoint in 2019 following 12 years at Schneider Electric. He said that the overall investment Bluewave has made into the city, as a whole, is significant..
“It's going to bring more expertise here, and I think it's going to keep a lot more expertise, as we continue to grow from leaving to going to other markets where there's more of a technology hub,” Jones said. “This is big for Louisville ... And it’s big for especially the enterprise customers.
"Ten years ago, was there an expertise gap in our market? I would probably say yes. But Bluewave’s changing it, and the investment they're making into bringing the right partners is changing [that]. I would make the argument that they’re on the forefront of changing [that], because they're actually driving investment into expertise and into the community around us.”
