Five years after moving to Raleigh, a tech company with South Carolina roots has increased its revenue 10 fold and envisions even more growth in 2024.
Software firm ImageQuix recently closed on its acquisition of Fotomerchant – its third deal of 2023 after Studio Ninja and SkyLab. It’s a move that CEO Alex Kovacevic says will propel the firm into a global brand in 2024 – and he credits Raleigh talent with driving the growth.
ImageQuix makes software for professional photographers – specializing in school photography. Its products help photographers who are capturing imagines of hundreds, even thousands of children – making sure they can identify each photo. It also helps facilitate the sales of those images to parents.
The latest buy is primarily a market share acquisition. As Fotomerchant is based in Australia, it also expands ImageQuix's geographic profile, which until this deal was limited to North America.
The acquisition comes just over a year after Charlesbank of Boston acquired ImageQuix from Alpine Investors. But Kovacevic says the firm has been profitable in its own right – though he says having a private equity wallet has helped its trajectory.
ImageQuix was founded in Greenville, South Carolina – initially specializing in making websites for wedding photographers. The software arm of private equity firm Alpine Investors bought the business in 2018. At the time, it was a firm with a handful of employees and less than $3 million in revenue.
Alpine brought Kovacevic on board to lead the company, and he moved it to the Triangle.
“With our expansion plans, Greenville, South Carolina, wasn’t the best location to recruit the talent we needed, especially engineering and tech talent,” he said. “So we relocated to Raleigh.”
Last year, when the firm was bought out by Charlesbank, it had more than 50 employees and nearly $20 million in revenue, just $2 million of which came through acquisitions. Today, it’s at about 120 employees (half of which are in the Triangle) and between $30 million and $50 million in revenue.
“We definitely see the opportunity to grow both organically and inorganically and we have a good amount of capital to facilitate that and execute our strategy,” Kovacevic said.
