Inflexion Private Equity is pleased to announce that it has completed a minority investment in UKFast, the UK’s leading cloud hosting provider. The investment is being made by Inflexion’s dedicated minority investment fund, Partnership Capital. The deal sees the firm valued at £405m.
Founded in 1998, Manchester-based UKFast has grown to become the UK’s largest privately-owned hosting provider. UKFast offers market-leading cloud and hosting platforms for businesses and government organisations to outsource their critical IT infrastructure. UKFast recently ventured into public icloud providing integration and support for AWS and Azure through a new division, ClearCloud.
UKFast is known for its world-class service and has five fully-owned, tier-3 data centres all ISO 27001 certified, PCI-compliant and secured to UK government IL4 standards. The business has a customer base of 5,500 UK SME clients and 200 mid-sized companies, which are served by UKFast’s 350 employees across its Manchester campus, London sales office and data centres.
UKFast will continue to be majority owned and led by the founder management team. The team were drawn to Inflexion’s experience in supporting technology businesses, local Manchester office and track record of successful IPOs. Inflexion is backing UKFast’s growth in an IT infrastructure services market worth around £2 billion and estimated to be growing at c.9% per annum. UKFast’s strong growth in this market is driven by a paradigm shift from on-premise to cloud.
UKFast has proven itself as a market leader, with its 350 strong team providing exemplary levels of customer service alongside superior technical performance. Acknowledging the industry’s increasing appetite for public cloud, UKFast’s management launched ClearCloud in 2018, thereby enhancing its offering to existing clients as well as opening the door to new ones. We look forward to working with management to support them to accelerate growth.
This investment was made by affiliated funds advised by Inflexion Private Equity Partners LLP.
