Advent Venture Partners has completed its fourth technology exit for the year after NICE Systems agreed to acquire portfolio company Fizzback, a customer feedback analytics vendor, for $80 million (£51 million).
Advent Venture Partners has completed its fourth technology exit for the year after NICE Systems agreed to acquire portfolio company Fizzback, a customer feedback analytics vendor, for $80 million (£51 million).
The firm first backed Fizzback chief executive Rob Keve in late 2006 and became the London company’s largest shareholder before the exit. Other backers in the company Keve founded in 2004 include Nauta Capital and The Accelerator Group.
Fizzback provides software-as-a-service that enables clients to gain real-time customer feedback by sending requests relating to a specific interaction or transaction via mobile, web or social media. Customers include British Telecom, O2, Best Buy Europe, Everything Everywhere, National Express, Virgin Media, Tesco, and a number of North American telecom carriers.
According to a statement from Advent, the sale to NICE, a Nasdaq-listed Israeli technology provider, generated a multiple of more than five-times Advent’s investment, and is the fourth exit by the technology team this year. NICE will acquire Fizzback for about $80 million in cash with the deal expected to close in beginning of fourth quarter this year. NICE expects the acquisition to add about $20 million to revenue next year.
Mike Chalfen, general partner at Advent, comments that the deal is ‘an amazing achievement’ for the company, adding that only $8 million of invested capital had been committed before the sale.
Keve writes on the company’s blog, ‘As consumers become more demanding, brand owners must respond. The brand owners must deploy and utilise technology that captures all forms of feedback and describes the customer journey. The integration of Fizzback into the NICE Customer Hub captures this vision.
He adds, ‘We have seen the market for technology to support customer service form over the last few years. We have seen attitudes and behaviour to customer service change. We have seen demand for ever-more sophisticated solutions articulated by innovative brand owners and we have seen the merging of the Fizzback proposition with the NICE proposition to directly address this.’
