Xceptor
International expansion of a software leader
The Challenge
Xceptor is a global leader in the end-to-end, no-code process automation market, providing software solutions to large financial institutions. With a strong management team, blue-chip clients and a growing market, Xceptor was well-placed to benefit from the sectoral growth trends of automation and digital transformation.
Xceptor selected CBPE to help them scale internationally, develop their go-to-market capability and continue the development of their product suite.
The Strategy
CBPE invested in Xceptor in 2017 recognising the highly regarded capabilities of the Xceptor platform and the increasing focus on workflow automation within the financial services sector. During our ownership, CBPE worked with CEO Andrew Koloumbrides, co-founder and CTO Dan Reid and the wider Xceptor team to significantly scale the business and develop a genuine best-in-class, process automation software vendor.
The business invested significantly into its sales and marketing capability and consequently materially improved its new customer win rate with top tier capital markets participants and also into a broader range of financial services businesses including asset management and security servicing firms.
Xceptor also invested in its international footprint, opening offices in the US and Singapore to cover the key global financial centres. This facilitated winning a greater spread of international clients as well as increased cross-sell to existing clients. By exit, US and APAC clients accounted for 52% and 11% of revenue respectively.
The product development team trebled in size during CBPE’s investment period, allowing greater productisation of the platform, enhance the machine learning capability of the platform and provide clients the choice of either on-premise or cloud hosted solutions.
The Result
At exit Xceptor was a truly global platform and had increased headcount by over fourfold. CBPE also strengthened the senior management team with eight additional hires putting the business in a strong position to continue its 35% per annum growth.
We exited our investment in March 2021 in a sale to private equity fund Astorg, generating a 10.8x return and an IRR of 89%.
CBPE have been a great partner for Xceptor over the last four years. They have helped to transform the business in multiple different ways, supporting our international growth, the development of our team and product offering. We look forward to continuing to build on this success with our new partners at Astorg.
It has been a real privilege to work with Andrew and the entire team at Xceptor. The past four years have seen the Business develop and grow significantly and we wish the team every success on the next stage of their growth journey. I would also like to extend our thanks to Ivan Martin for his significant contribution as Chairman of Xceptor from 2016.
Investment summary
Date of investmentFebruary 2017
Exit dateApril 2021
SectorTechnology
Multiple of Capital10.8x
CBPE OwnershipMajority
IRR89%
WebsiteView website
Key outcomes
Revenue growth
Senior management hires
Increase in headcount