Milton Keynes based software business secures £2.5m

BGF has today announced its £2.5m investment in software company Celaton.

Founded in 2004 by Andrew Anderson and Gary Grant, Celaton was created through the MBO of Redrock Technologies from Netstore plc and the subsequent acquisition of DG Tech Ltd. The Company’s inSTREAM™ software is delivered ‘as a service’ from a ‘cloud’ environment and automates the handling of all the inbound information streams that flow into and through organisations every day such as customer correspondence, financial documents, employee records, legal matter and insurance claims that are received by post, paper, email, fax, mobile or other electronic data streams.

Celaton currently employs over 60 staff across three locations in the United Kingdom including its head office in Milton Keynes and two document process outsourcing centres in Southampton and Wigan from where it streamlines the handling of customers post and physical paper based documents. In its financial year June 2012 the Company delivered revenues of £2.2m. The investment of growth capital from BGF will support the accelerated development of a sales and marketing infrastructure that will enable Celaton to drives sales into both the public and private sectors.

Rob Wirszycz has been Chairman of Celaton for three years and has helped to steer the company through to the successful funding by BGF. Rob will continue to serve on the board as non-executive director and Tim Bittleston, who was introduced to the company through BGF’s Talent Network, will join the board as Chairman. Tim has considerable experience at CEO and non-executive levels at a number of IT and software businesses and has raised over £150m in venture capital for various successful enterprises over the past 12 years. Tim Whittard, Investment Director, will also join the board as BGF’s representative.

This is the fourth investment to be led by BGF’s Midlands regional team and Celaton is the fifth IT business to be backed by BGF.  Other investments in the sector include online employee reward and benefit scheme provider Benefex, independent telecoms and data services provider GCI Com, cloud-enabled document collaboration software SkyDox and Broadbandchoices.co.uk, a leading UK provider of home communications price comparison services.

Tim Whittard, Investment Director commented: “Celaton has the enviable combination of a truly disruptive software offering and a hugely experienced management team and as such, we were convinced that it is a company with huge growth potential and ready to take on expansion capital in order to take the business to the next stage. Celaton has a strong pipeline of prospects and the strengthening of the Celaton sales team will only increase this.

“Andrew, Gary and the rest of the team have proven that they can successfully build fast growing technology companies and we are delighted to be part of Celaton’s development.”

Andrew Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Celaton, commented: “Celaton software is transforming the way that organisations handle their inbound information streams and as a result we’ve attracted an enviable high profile customer base. We’re keen to maximise our growth in our core sectors and penetrate further into public sector where we know there is a significant need to improve productivity and reduce costs. Celaton is incredibly well placed to take advantage of this with the addition of BGF’s expansion capital and an enhanced management, sales and marketing team.

“Our inSTREAM™ software has been the catalyst for success in other ways. We have recently created a new subsidiary company under a new Redrock brand to provide document process outsourcing services to public sector organisations. The new Redrock business not only leverages inSTREAM™ technology to deliver greater efficiency in document processing but it has committed to provide meaningful and sustainable employment for people with disabilities. This commitment to support employment for disabled people has earned it ‘Support Business’ status and comes at an important time when many hundreds of disabled people have lost their jobs through the closure of Remploy.

“Our management team is critical to our success and I am delighted to welcome Tim Bittleston and Tim Whittard to the board at this key stage in Celaton’s development. I am very confident that their knowledge and expertise will be invaluable to a growing company such as ours.”