Celerity secures £15m investment from BGF
Investment from Business Growth Fund will go towards scaling up Celerity’s managed services offering
Celerity has secured £15m in investment from Business Growth Fund (BGF), with CEO Chris Roche claiming that now is the "perfect time" for the MSP to supercharge its growth strategy.
Founded in 2002, Preston-based Celerity originally made a name for itself as an infrastructure provider, but then expanded its business into cloud and managed services.
The Platinum-level IBM and Lenovo partner will use the funds from BGF to scale up its managed services offering which will be delivered alongside its own IP.
Set up in 2011 to address a lack of funding available to SME-sized businesses, BGF boasts a balance sheet of more than £2.5bn.
The investor claims that it will only invest an initial £1m to £15m in any one business and pledges to only take a minority stake which typically falls between 10 and 40 per cent.
BGF was ranked as the UK channel's third biggest private equity backer in CRN's Private Equity report, having previously made investments in Roc Technologies, TiG, Inoapps, GCI, Invenio and Olive among others.
It claims to have invested more than £100m in tech businesses in 2021 alone and £538m to date, claiming to have made 70 per cent of its investments outside of London and the South East.
As part of the investment, BGF's Phil Male and Harry Jones will join Celerity's board with the former joining as non-executive chair.
In a statement, Celerity CEO Chris Roche said that now is the perfect time for the business to supercharge its growth strategy.
"In the last 19 years we have achieved sustained business growth and critical acclaim, by diversifying from provision of enterprise infrastructure to a cloud and managed services specialist across both public and private sectors. Having developed our mission critical solutions, and with a strong senior team in place, we felt now was the perfect time to accelerate our growth.
"As such, we wanted to engage with a like-minded investor with the experience and expertise of scaling other high-growth technology businesses. BGF has extensive experience in this sector, and we're delighted to be partnering with the team to supercharge our growth. "
The deal was led by BGF investors and members of its North West team Harry Jones and Spencer Woods.
"We have known the team at Celerity for several years and recognised a strong cultural alignment between our organisations," said Jones.
"We have closely tracked their transition from a reseller and integrator of infrastructure to a highly successful IT managed services provider. Celerity's impressive growth has accelerated rapidly through major contract wins, with managed service revenues more than quadrupling in the last 12 months. The management team's track record of delivering growth, and the vast potential that exists within this market, made the company an extremely attractive investment proposition."