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India-focused private equity (PE) firm Everstone Capital and private equity fund Solmark have acquired a controlling stake in Chennai-based Servion Global Solutions for ₹403 crore.
The investment has been done through Everstone Group’s technology investing platform Evertech Pte. The transaction, which was advised by Avendus Capital, will provide an exit to most of the existing financial investors and non-working promoters, the PE firm said in a statement.
Servion provides Customer Interaction Management (CIM) solutions and applications for companies that help in enhancing customer interactions over the phone, Internet, e-mail, chat and social media. The company, which has a footprint in 60 countries, posted revenues of ₹350 crore in FY2014.
In an e-mail response, Servion Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director K Balakrishnan told BusinessLine that Everstone has made a secondary purchase, adding this was not “an acquisition nor an ouster of the existing management team”. “Some of the existing investors — Flordia Capital, Basil and associates — and a part of the original founding team, who remained invested for a long time, were looking for an exit,” he said, adding that the existing management team will continue to operate and there will be no change in “our strategy or culture”.
New board membersPrateek Dhawan, Managing Director at Everstone and Puneet Pushkarna, General Partner at Solmark, will join Servion’s board. Solmark is a US-based equity fund founded by a group of tech entrepreneurs. It has a presence in the Silicon Valley, New York, Washington DC and Singapore.
“We aim to widen our footprint, design and adopt new age technologies, deepen our understanding of customer problems and as a result, positively impact every single interaction happening across the world,” Servion’s Balakrishnan.
“To enable us to get there, we need to make strategic investments in several critical areas, and this partnership will help us address that,” he added.
Servion expect revenues to grow to over ₹1,000 crore in the next few years. It plans to invest investing in areas like cloud, analytics and its intelligent self-service platform ServIntuit, he said. With interests in consumer, retail and food sectors, Everstone has investments in fashion house Ritu Kumar, VLCC Healthcare, Tikona Digital, Future Media, Future E-commerce, F&B Asia Ventures, Blue Foods, Capital Foods and Sula Vineyards.
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