Oakley Capital agrees to acquire Spanish software business Ekon

Oakley Capital (“Oakley”) has agreed to acquire Ekon, a Spanish provider of business software, as a carve-out from the Iberian operations of current owner Unit4. The investment marks Oakley’s first in Spain.

Founded in 1963, Ekon provides Enterprise Resource Planning (“ERP”) software to over 1,000 SMEs in Spain. The company generates revenues c.€20m from sales of its integrated software suite, which includes solutions for finance, payroll and CRM, as well as dedicated vertical modules for manufacturing, wholesale, health, retail and construction. The service is available in on-premise and hosted deployments, or via Ekon’s Cloud, which offers ERP solutions via a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) delivery model. Ekon’s software is developed exclusively in Spain, making it one of the few significant local players in a market which has low cloud ERP penetration versus other European markets.

This investment is Oakley’s latest in the TMT sector, which is one of three core sectors it targets, alongside Education and Digital Consumer Brands. Other TMT companies in the Oakley portfolio include WebPros, encompassing cPanel and Plesk, which provides the leading SaaS platforms for server management globally.

Peter Dubens, Managing Partner of Oakley Capital commented:

“With highly visible revenues, a loyal customer base and a clear structural growth opportunity, Ekon demonstrates many of the key characteristics that Oakley targets in an investment. We believe the business has a best-in-class solution and is well positioned to capitalise on the growing demand for cloud ERP. This deal presents another opportunity for us to draw on our expertise in software and complex carve-outs and we very much look forward to supporting Juan Antonio and his team as they accelerate growth over the coming years.”