Godspeed Capital announces third acquisition in three weeks, with many more to come

Just three weeks after kicking off the new year with a new platform investment in Varen Technologies, Godspeed Capital Management will announce later this morning that it has acquired Savli Group, a provider of software and information technology to mission-oriented federal agencies. Savli’s offerings leverage the popular ServiceNow workflow software. PE Hub touched base with Godspeed founder Douglas T Lake Jr about the firm’s latest deal.

Godspeed is a lower mid-market private equity firm focused on investing in companies in the defense and government services sector. The Savli deal marks the second add-on since Godspeed invested in Varen, with the first being Exceptional Software Strategies. The three companies fall under a holding company designed to provide US defense and intelligence community agencies with a suite of software and services to combat rising cybersecurity and intelligence threats. Previously, Lake told PE Hub that the pipeline for add-ons is at a least a dozen.

Savli represents an opportunity to “enhance the continued capabilities, services and solutions we can offer our core intelligence and defense community customers,” Lake said. “This is a new capability that we are bringing in house that we don’t currently offer to legacy Varen access businesses.”

Savli is one of 120 “elite” ServiceNow service and sales partners globally.

“There are other large players in the intelligence community who are re-sellers of ServiceNow software, but we are now a leader in advising around the implementation and ultimate execution of using that platform” Lake explained.

ServiceNow is “increasingly gaining acceptance across the federal government marketplace and growing very quickly in the intelligence community,” Lake said. “In that community, work is very compartmentalized, and the work force is spread out all over the country and globally. Managing people, especially with security clearances – there is sensitivity there understandably,” he said.

This deal was a majority acquisition with management roll-over equity participation.

The plan is to cross-sell Savli’s offerings across the portfolio’s customers as well as to new customers.

Lake sees a long future for the holding company. “We want to build out the platform with a view towards investing in our people, technology and infrastructure as well as enhancing our ability to recruit and retain the very best talent and through all that, win more work from our clients, because we can offer them a greater level of support under one umbrella.”