Amdaris

Amdaris used growth capital from BGF to fund its international expansion strategy, creating developer bases in new territories, and opening offices in Bulgaria and Ukraine. During our three-year partnership, Amdaris scaled its team from 250 to 800 people, and grew revenue from £10 million to £40 million, leading to a highly successful exit.

Strengthening the foundations

Alongside funding, we provided ongoing scaleup support to the team:

• Introducing Amdaris to Paul Brennan, who assumed the role of Non-Executive Chair on its Board
• Organising a tech workshop with our Head of Digital, which led to the adoption of Netsuite (a multi-territory ERP/CRM system), to aid with international growth
• Sourcing CFO mentoring and CEO coaching for the team
• Providing guidance on early engagement with advisors on their exit strategy

Amdaris was also able to:

• Hire a Chief Operating Officer, who built an internal recruitment function, onboarding 20 people a month
• Provide equity incentivisation to its team, driving a high-performance culture, supported by the introduction of operational board meetings

Developing leadership capabilities

We introduced the company to its Non-Executive Chair, Paul Brennan, who had over 20 years’ experience working with PE-backed enterprises, coupled with extensive M&A experience (following a corporate career that began at IBM). Paul is also Chair at both Talmix and Cyacomb.

Following our investment, the Board also embraced regular engagement with BoardClic, an online performance review tool that allows boards to track effectiveness, alignment, and composition.

As Amdaris prepared for a future exit event, Co-Founder and Co-CEO Andy Rogers was also keen to ensure he was ‘match fit’ to lead the business, both through the transaction and into its next growth phase. So we introduced him to The Tall Wall, a specialist executive coaching firm. Andy’s coach was a former big four strategy partner, who helped him prepare for the sale and develop his leadership capabilities, through a bespoke 360 feedback, alongside confidential 1:1 sessions.

Meanwhile, we introduced Amdaris’ CFO to a former PE-backed CFO, to help him provide more strategic guidance and leadership to his finance function. As a result of this engagement, the CFO was able to create a meaningful, coherent, and ‘sticky’ vision. The process was also used to assess the skills and resources within the finance function, as well as helping the team optimise their core finance deliverables. And they later provided a valuable sounding board, during the sale process.

To support the team in managing an accelerated and significant scale-up strategy, its Chief Technology Officer and Chief Delivery Officer were also introduced to experts at FreemanClarke, a leading agency for fractional CIOs and CTOs. They provided further leadership coaching and mentoring, which resulted in the CTO and CDO functions significantly raising their profiles (both within Amdaris and externally with customers and prospective customers).

Delivering 4x revenue growth

During our partnership, Amdaris built a bespoke system, using internal development capability, which flagged when existing customers were potentially at risk of churning and helped with resource management.

It also implemented a new approach to sales team performance management, with guidance from BGF-introduced Sales Blueprint, whose team of sales and marketing consultants have worked with more than 10 companies in our portfolio so far.

Alongside this, Amdaris built a specific product for our portfolio, with our investment team helping to identify new sales opportunities and making targeted introductions to BGF-backed businesses. This enabled Amdaris to generate £10 million in additional revenue from our portfolio.

Exit route

Our partnership with Amdaris resulted in growth and commercial excellence, positioning the company as a leading player in the software development and digital transformation space.

Through strategic investments, leadership enhancements, and a relentless focus on delivering value to its clients, Amdaris achieved extraordinary results. The business ultimately realised a significant exit, being acquired by Insight Enterprises Inc, a Fortune 500 Solutions Integrator. At the time of exit, Amdaris was one of the UK’s fastest-growing technology companies.