Member Article

UKFast Closes Record Year with Investment Deal

Cloud hosting firm UKFast closed a record 2018 with the announcement of a landmark investment which sees Inflexion Private Equity take a c.30% stake in the business.

The investment into UKFast is being made by Inflexion’s dedicated minority investment fund, Partnership Capital. The deal sees the firm valued at £405 million, based on £25 million EBITDA.

Founded in 1999, by Lawrence Jones MBE and Gail Jones, Manchester-based UKFast has grown to become the UK’s largest privately owned hosting provider.

The company offers market-leading cloud and hosting platforms for businesses and government organisations to outsource their critical IT infrastructure.

UKFast recently ventured into public cloud providing integration and support for AWS and Azure through new division, ClearCloud.

UKFast is known for its world-class service and has five fully owned, tier-3 data centres all ISO 27001 certified, PCI-compliant and secured to UK government IL4 standards.

The business has a customer base of 5,500 UK SME clients and 200 mid-sized companies, which are served by UKFast’s 350 employees across its Manchester campus, London sales office and data centres.

The IT infrastructure services market is worth around £2 billion and estimated to be growing at c.9% per annum. UKFast’s strong growth in this market is driven by a paradigm shift from on-premise to cloud.

Lawrence Jones, CEO and co-founder of UKFast, commented: “It has been widely reported about our ambitions to IPO. After spending time in the City meeting fund managers I learned that it is incredibly important to align yourself with people who’ve got experience in areas that you don’t.

“When Inflexion threw their hat into the ring, alongside several others, there was an immediate connection. The Inflexion team have got an incredible reputation when they have invested pre-IPO. That reputation, coupled with their team headed up by Carl Wormald and Irina Hemmers is something that gives us great confidence for the future.

“Growing a successful business is all about people. I am so proud of my management team and everyone who works at UKFast, when you think that they’ve grown this business from a spare bedroom in Manchester to where it is now. What’s even more incredible is the potential we have to take UKFast to new heights.

“Huge thanks to the team from GCA Altium, headed up by Phil Adams, and to Howard Gill from Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang. A complex deal like this can’t happen without brilliant people like these.”

Simon Turner, Managing Partner of Inflexion, commented: “UKFast has proven itself as a market leader, with its Manchester campus and data centres being testament to the business’s dedication to service excellence and technical performance. Acknowledging the industry’s increasing appetite for public cloud, UKFast’s management launched ClearCloud in 2018, thereby enhancing its offering to existing clients as well as opening the door to new ones. We look forward to working with management to accelerate growth.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tim Parker .