Cinven and OTPP to invest in dogado via group.ONE

The investment will see the company combine with group.ONE, a Sweden-headquartered web hosting provider backed by Cinven since 2018, according to a statement from the buyers.

Cinven and OTPP said in the statement that dogado and group.ONE have strong financial track records, having shown to be resilient through challenging macro environments, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the more recent economic and geopolitical uncertainty, thanks to their recurring subscription models, their large and highly diversified customer bases, and the mission-critical nature and low absolute cost of their offerings.

The investment will be part of the Seventh Cinven Fund, which raised EUR 10bn against a target of EUR 8bn in 2019, according to Unquote Data. Plans are reportedly underway for an Eighth Cinven Fund, with a USD 12bn target.

TMT advisory boutique Arma Partners was appointed by Triton in late summer to market the business, which was being sold off EBITDA of around EUR 40m-EUR 45m, according to sister publication Mergermarket.

The Cinven-OTPP joint-bid fended off bidders including Goldman Sachs’s private equity arm, BlackRock and Hg, which is the owner of peer Team.Blue, according to Mergermarket. BlackRock’s offer came in at EUR 645m for the asset, just above 16x EBITDA, with the cut-off for bids at the EUR 600m mark. Dogado was expected to be valued at around 15-18x EBITDA with top-end enterprise value stretching to EUR 810m, as reported.

The combination of group.ONE and dogado will create a “pan-European one-stop-shop provider” of online presence solutions for small- and medium-sized enterprises and small-office home-offices including domain, web hosting, cloud hosting, business software and digital marketing services, according to an OTPP statement.

Through its 650 employees, group.ONE operates in the Nordic, Benelux and other European mass hosting markets, according to a statement. Cinven acquired the company via Sixth Cinven Fund in 2018.

Triton acquired dogado as part of a 2012 deal for Netherlands-based European Directories, and subsequently bolstered the German company with more than 30 acquisitions, including Checkdomain, Campusspeicher.de, Profihost and KAMP Netzwerkdienste in Germany, Herold and Easyname in Austria, and METANET in Switzerland. Under the sponsor’s ownership, the company increased sales from EUR 2m to EUR 120m and grew its number of employees from 12 to over 500.

Company
Founded in 2006, dogado provides small- and medium-sized companies in the DACH region with cloud-based hosting and digital marketing services. Its offer includes mass and cloud hosting and digital marketing services. It operates from offices across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and serves more than 380,000 customers.

People
Triton – Björn Osterloff (operating partner).
Cinven – Thomas Railhac (partner).
OTPP – Jean-Charles Douin (senior managing director, private capital for Europe, the Middle East and Africa).
dogado – Daniel Hagemeier (CEO)
group.ONE – Stephan Wolfram (CEO).

Advisor
Triton – Arma Partners (M&A)

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