New ownership to fuel continued growth of Plimus as the leading global e-Commerce, marketing and payment platform for digital goods, online services and SaaS business models.
Fremont, CA – August 8, 2011 – Great Hill Partners announced today the acquisition of Plimus Inc., from a shareholder group including Susquehanna Growth Equity LLC, Plimus founders, key management members and employees. Plimus enables businesses to “take charge" and assume full control of selling digital goods and services online. A business can choose Plimus’ simple to implement, hosted and complete application that uniquely spans the entire e-Commerce lifecycle, or it can deploy the new Plimus Buy Anyware ™ API which allows it to integrate with existing solutions. Both solutions help businesses successfully sell using secure global payments optimizing their ability to build new markets, develop business partnerships, improve sales and monitor performance metrics.
Plimus has a rapidly expanding user base of more than 6,500 small to medium size business and rapid growth enterprises worldwide with a platform that supports many business models including SaaS and Cloud based solutions. With this strong growth in its seller base, Plimus has experienced equally strong growth in transactions, revenue and profit. Following the close of the transaction, the current senior management team and employees led by CEO Hagai Tal will work with Great Hill Partners to continue carrying out Plimus’ long-term business plan.
The e-Commerce landscape is quickly transforming as customer expectations evolve and new forms of digital goods and services like SaaS and video content grow in market share. In fact, industry analyst firm Forrester Research forecasts that the e-Commerce market in just the U.S. alone will reach $300 billion by 2012 with digital goods and services comprising a growing proportion of e-Commerce revenue. In this growing market the popularity and growth of the social web makes it increasingly important to reach the right prospects with the right offers and make the shopping experience as frictionless as possible. Converting them into paying customers is an even bigger challenge—and keeping them coming back to buy from businesses again and again is truly a science. Focus needs to be on using the right tools like dynamic subscriptions and geographically appropriate payment methods to increase average order value while boosting close rates to make the most of the traffic coming to a virtual store. This is the value of Plimus, and increasingly fast growth internet businesses are utilizing Plimus to monetize their businesses in these new markets.
“With our solid existing customer base and favorable market trends, we are fortunate to work with Great Hill Partners to expand our ability to capture the opportunities ahead,” said CEO. Hagai Tal. “Our Plimus teams in the U.S. and Israel will continue to focus on our clients’ successful monetization in an increasingly global, complex and expanding online and mobile world. Our vision of e-Commerce 3.0 and frictionless e-Commerce will fuel these solutions.”
Chris Busby, a principal at Great Hill, says: “Plimus is an innovative, profitable and rapidly growing company. It represents an exciting opportunity to capitalize on the favorable trends in the digital goods and content sectors. We are excited to partner with management and will provide the additional capital and resources necessary to help Plimus expand as well as pursue strategic opportunities.”
After the close of the transaction Matt Vettel, Chris Busby and Nick Cayer from Great Hill will join the Plimus Board of Directors.
Raymond James & Associates served as financial advisor to Plimus in this transaction.
About Plimus
Plimus, Inc., a global e-Commerce solutions provider, builds and manages online businesses for thousands of software publishers, Web hosting companies and online retailers. Plimus offers an easy-to-implement, configurable e-Business platform that allows companies to grow their e-Commerce business worldwide by marketing, selling and distributing digital goods and services online. The company’s award-winning e-Commerce Application is a flexible, hosted, and complete application that uniquely spans the entire e-Commerce lifecycle and is connected to a large global affiliate network. For more information, please visit www.plimus.com.
About Great Hill Partners
Great Hill Partners is a private equity firm that manages more than $2.5 billion in capital to finance the expansion, recapitalization or acquisition of growth companies in a wide range of sectors within the business and consumer services, media, communications and software industries. Great Hill targets investments of $25 million to $150 million. For more information, please visit www.greathillpartners.com.
