Daisy spin off Digital Wholesale Solutions to sell stake to UKFast investor Inflexion - report

Daisy spin-off valued at more than £1bn in rumoured deal with private equity firm

Daisy spin-off Digital Wholesale Solutions (DWS) has agreed to sell a minority stake in the business to private equity investor Inflexion.

The deal was agreed over the Christmas period and is likely to close over the next month, according to The Financial Times which cited two people with direct knowledge of the talks.

Inflexion, which also owns Manchester-based managed hosting firm UKFast, valued the Daisy cloud computing unit at more than £1bn during the negotiations.

The newspaper claims the investment comes ahead of plans to potentially float Digital Wholesale Solutions within the next three years following the success of other IT companies such as Softcat and Gamma Telecom.

Daisy founder Matthew Riley, who took a more active role in the business in 2018 after three years as non-executive chairman, will remain as chairman of the DWS business.

DWS was formed last year after Daisy rolled its three channel businesses (Daisy Wholesale, Daisy Distribution and Daisy Worldwide) into a new entity under CEO Terry O'Brien.

At the time O'Brien said the move would position DWS as a "super aggregator" of cloud, IT and comms solutions for channel partners.

DWS went on to acquire cloud distributor Giacom in November which O'Brien said would expand its business to serve more than 5,500 partners.