Reading: Apse Capital makes 'significant investment' in Ultima

Driven by the acceleration in the market for intelligent infrastructure delivery, Reading-based tech company Ultima has received a significant investment from European private equity group Apse Capital.

Ultima has grown steadily over the past 28 years, but more recently has moved to an Intelligent Automation (IA) strategy, augmenting its core infrastructure delivery with modern RPA, Chatbot, IoT and AI technologies. It is the growth prospects of this platform combined with a burgeoning market that has led Apse Capital to buy a majority stake in Ultima.

Ultima, the Intelligent Transformation expert, partners with industry leading vendors to support the technology infrastructure needs of its enterprise and mid-market clients to deliver high-value business outcomes. Apse Capital’s investment in Ultima’s Intelligent Automation strategy will expedite its ambitious plans for growth, focusing on people, systems and its overall capability to create a leading IA infrastructure service for UK enterprises.

The investment will drive innovation and efficiency outcomes to Ultima’s clients and, in the longer term, will help to finance selective M&As designed to extend Ultima's reach into the cloud and managed services arena. Ultima’s management team will benefit from the addition of board members from Apse Capital and business operations will continue to be run with Scott Dodds as CEO and Max McNeill remaining as a significant minority shareholder of Ultima and member of the board.

Scott Dodds, CEO, Ultima, commented: “We are delighted to be working with Apse Capital, who have been highly engaged and extremely supportive of our strategy for growth in this dynamic and fast-moving technology industry. We have built a strong platform for growth and innovation for our clients and Apse will add significant value and acceleration to this platform through their deep sector knowledge and focus on digital strategy innovation. The future for Ultima, its strategic vendor partners and above all the delivery of technical innovation to our loyal and growing client base, has been enhanced significantly by the addition of the Apse Capital team.”

Tim Green, managing partner, Apse Capital, added: “Our investment in Ultima marks an exciting milestone in the company’s history. We are looking forward to working closely with Scott Dodds and the wider management team to accelerate growth and deliver cutting edge solutions to their loyal customer base.”

Apse Capital is a new independent European private equity group. It specialises in buyout and development capital investment opportunities, partnering with high quality management teams to grow businesses, either organically or through acquisition. Its focus is on businesses creating, delivering, transforming and/or monetising the digital economy in Europe. In the past three years the Apse Capital team have delivered €1.5 billion in enterprise value across 24 transactions, including acquisitions, financings and exits.

Ultima was advised in the transaction by Lincoln International (Corporate Finance) and BDB Pitmans (Legal).