ArcLight talks Elevate Renewables; CD&R in talks over Focus Financial take-private

Good morning Hubsters, Craig McGlashan here filling in for MK Flynn on the Wire.

On the menu today we have an in-depth look at ArcLight Capital Partners’ plans for its battery storage firm Elevate Renewables, with PE Hub’s Obey Martin Manayiti interviewing partner Angelo Acconcia. Elsewhere, Clayton, Dubilier and Rice are looking to take an investment adviser private, Vista closes its takeover of KnowBe4 and American Pacific Group invests in a digital printing company. We also have a couple of add-ons to tell you about.

Deal drivers. Obey Martin Manayiti has a fascinating interview with ArcLight Capital Partners’ Angelo Acconcia, who chatted about his firm’s creation of Elevate Renewables, a company focused on battery storage.

There’s plenty to enjoy in the interview, including Acconcia’s outlook for power demand in the US and how electrification is playing its part in meeting that demand while driving decarbonization and providing sustainable infrastructure.

But the part that particularly caught my eye was that the high pace of electric car production is adding urgency to the development of utility battery storage to power charging systems.

“We don’t think today’s infrastructure has the ability to meet those needs and, increasingly, regulators and policymakers are recognizing that,” Acconcia told Obey.

Check out the full interview here.

Improving infrastructure to accommodate electric cars is also a theme we’ve seen over on PE Hub Europe, but the lack of support for such vehicles is driving investments in other areas too.

I spoke to Battery Ventures partner Zak Ewen earlier this month about his firm’s acquisition of fleet management software providers Vimcar and Avrios.

Such software can help firms that are electrifying their fleets meet new requirements, he said. “[If] there’s not an electric charging station within a certain radius of that job site, or I can’t send this electrical vehicle to the repair shop that we typically use because they don’t service electric vehicles, things like that,” said Ewen.

Here’s the full interview on PE Hub Europe.

Take-private. Clayton, Dubilier and Rice has entered into an exclusivity agreement with Focus Financial Partners with a view to buying the Nasdaq-listed investment adviser.
The Focus Financial board is considering the offer, of $53 per share in cash, according to a statement. That is a premium of 36 percent to the 60-day volume weighted average price as of yesterday’s close. It would value the company at around $4 billion.

Deal secured. Vista Equity Partners has closed its previously announced buyout of cybersecurity firm KnowBe4, in a take private deal for $24.90 per share in cash.
With the completion of this deal, KnowBe4 is no longer trading on the Nasdaq.

To learn about Vista’s outlook for the year ahead, check out PE Hub’s Q&A with president and COO David Breach.

Printing. Straight off the presses this morning, American Pacific Group has made an investment in Media One, a Garden Grove, California-based distributor of digital printing solutions. No financial terms were disclosed.

Media One was founded in 2001.

In the zone. Switching to add-ons, and Thoma Bravo portfolio company QAD has acquired Redzone, a connected workforce platform for manufacturing companies. The deal was for nearly $1 billion.

This is the second acquisition completed by QAD in the last two months. In December, QAD acquired Livejourney, a provider of a real-time process mining and predictive modeling solution designed to discover, monitor and improve business processes.

“The acquisition of Redzone, with its impressive growth trajectory in a large, unpenetrated $40 billion market, demonstrates our commitment to advancing QAD’s vision and to further building its leadership position in the broader industrial software universe,” said Peter Stefanski, a partner at Thoma Bravo, in a statement.

Transfer. Redwood Software, which is backed by Turn/River Capital, has acquired Arlington, Virginia-based Cerberus, a secure file transfer provider. Redwood Software is a full-stack automation company. Cerberus provides secure file transfer products to many companies, including Lenovo, NASA, National Health Service, PwC, Sodexo and SpaceX.

That’s it from me. Obey will be with you tomorrow to take you through to the weekend.

Cheers,

Craig