Exclusive: Summit Partners buys PrismHR
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Summit Partners has agreed to acquire a majority stake in PrismHR, a Massachusetts-based SaaS suite for HR service providers, Axios has learned. Part of the more than $100 million in proceeds will be used to provide partial liquidity to existing PrismHR investor Accel-KKR, which will roll over a portion of its holdings and retain one of its two board seats.
Special sauce: The difference between PrismHR and other HR software companies is target market. Whereas most human capital management solutions serve a single corporate client, PrismHR aims at organizations that may have a single employee working for multiple clients (e.g., a restaurant, a bar and a pizza place). In such cases, benefits might need to be calculated differently at different levels.
Deal genesis: Summit first contacted PrismHR several years ago via its cold-calling program, but conversations didn't really heat up until late 2016.
Plans: The deal is effectively about growth, although Summit doesn't view this as a rollup opportunity. Instead, the idea is to scale up PrismHR's nearly 200-person workforce (both on tech and sales side), with CEO Gary Noke saying he can "see a straight path past $100 million in revenue." The current run rate is north of $35 million, compared to $7 million when Noke took over for the company's founding CEO in 2014.
