Metro-DC Area Capital Markets Snapshot November 2013

Despite reports that overall deal activity in 2013 is sluggish, the Metropolitan DC commercial market continues to attract investors. Some noteworthy transactions for the month of November include:

New Mountain Capital acquired a controlling interest in ACA Compliance Group, the global regulatory compliance consultancy firm based in Washington, DC.  The growth capital will be used to fund further growth as well as expansion into related corporate governance and risk services areas. The firm’s five original founders and partners will maintain a significant investment in the new entity and there are no changes expected to be made to the senior leadership team.

Maryland-based Roadnet Technologies, Inc., the provider of fleet management software and analytics tools, was acquired by Omnitracs, the SaaS-based fleet management solutions company backed by Vista Equity Partners. The $40M software company was previously a part of UPS before it was acquired most recently by Thoma Bravo in 2010.

Crossfield Data Services, Inc., the McLean-based data analytics and data production services company, was acquired by InferX Corporation, the predictive analytics and business intelligence solutions firm. The transaction enhances the combined entity’s legal analytics offerings with Crossfield’s strong track record in the e-discovery arena and specialized document discovery tools.

DataRPM Corporation, the BI and analytics solutions firm based in Fairfax, raised $800K in a seed round of funding led by new investor, 20K Industries and existing investor, CIT GAP Funds. The Company plans to use the capital to to build a sales and marketing team, accelerate product development and expand its customer support team. DataRPM provides a cloud or on-premise platform that enables customers to connect to any data source and get insights from their data, without requiring learning complex software interfaces.

The social business performance company, NationalField, was acquired by NGP VAN, Inc., provider of fundraising, compliance, and new media software. The Washington, DC-based firm offers enterprise social networking solutions, stream of real-time information, and social performance management solutions.

Celcite Management Solutions, LLC, the provider of self optimizing network (SON) and network management solutions, was acquired by Amdocs Limited (NYSE:DOX) for roughly $130M. The Herndon-based firm operates a flexible, scalable, multi-vendor, multi-technology automation platform that helps to maximize network capacity and quality for 20 operators spanning four continents across the globe.

To be fair, the global M&A markets are still recovering and are certainly slower than expected at the beginning of this year. That said, the level of activity in the DC-metro market is evidence that there is a willingness and strong appetite for M&A and capital formation on the part of strategic acquirers and financial investors for good properties with strong growth characteristics or potential. As evidenced by the deals above, we believe this is particularly true for companies that ease the pain of compliance and heightened regulations for corporations and provide deeper insights into their business, customers and/or operations through business intelligence and analytics solutions.