Korbyt Now Majority-Owned By PE Firm; Investment Brings “Significant” Growth Capital

July 18, 2023 by Dave Haynes

Dallas-based software firm Korbyt has a new majority owner, the Boston private equity firm Clearhaven Partners.

The company in an announcement this morning said it has received “significant growth investment” funding in the deal, enabling it to grow sales and the partner ecosystem, as well as drive additional software development on its SaaS platform.

“Clearhaven’s deep software industry expertise and shared vision for growth align well with our strategic objectives,” says Ankur Ahlowalia, CEO of Korbyt. “Together, Korbyt and Clearhaven will accelerate momentum as the leading provider of cloud-native digital signage and corporate communications software, further invest in the product portfolio and our experienced and passionate team, and continue exceeding customer expectations through best-in-class customer support.”

Financial terms were not disclosed, but I asked and confirmed Clearhaven now has a majority position in the company. Another investment firm, Virgo Capital, also has a minority position in Korbyt.

Clearhaven says it invests exclusively in software and software-driven companies across major thematic areas that drive business software demand.

“At Clearhaven, we see an enormous opportunity in workplace experience technology, as legacy solutions no longer meet enterprises’ growing need for enhanced communication and engagement solutions for distributed employees and customers,” says Managing Partner Christopher Ryan. “Korbyt is well positioned to capitalize on this tremendous market opportunity through its innovative platform that allows organizations to natively deliver market-leading workplace experience technology across a diverse set of endpoints and use-cases through a single integrated platform.”

Korbyt is the evolved brand name of what started out many years ago as Symon Communications, and then through an exotic merger took an odd, ill-advised left turn into digital OOH. It has more recently dropped the RMG Networks brand and gone back to its roots, syncing the company name with the core product name, and mainly doing data-driven visuals for environments like contact centers and production facilities.

Korbyt, says PR, is the workplace experience technology partner of choice for 400 global enterprises, including 60 of the Fortune 100 across many industries, including financial services, manufacturing & distribution, healthcare, retail, insurance and higher education.

The Korbyt Anywhere platform enables content and data to be seamlessly shared across multiple channels such as digital signage, employee desktops, mobile devices, meeting rooms and more. Korbyt’s customers benefit from a single, highly configurable platform with robust native integrations and machine learning technology that empowers communications, IT, marketing and operations teams to visualize real-time content and better engage with both employees and customers.

One of the interesting aspects of this deal is who else is in the Clearhaven portfolio. A year ago, the PE company acquired SundaySky, an Israeli company that does mass video creation.

SundaySky’s SaaS platform features patented technology that allows business professionals, regardless of creative skill level, to efficiently create, personalize, manage, distribute and optimize captivating videos to reach their valuable constituents. SundaySky’s technology platform empowers businesses to reduce their reliance on traditional resource-intensive video production models and services that incur significant costs, time and require specialized creative and technical skills.

The application for digital signage is fairly obvious.

M&A activity in this industry kind of ground to a halt for a while there, but this is the third acquisition I’m aware of in the last week or so, with PE-backed Spectrio acquiring InReality, and France’s Cenareo acquiring a video production firm.