UKFast valued at £405m after new investment from Inflexion

Cloud hosting firm UKFast closed a record 2018 with the announcement of a new investment from Inflexion Private Equity, which will take a 30% stake in the UK’s largest privately owned hosting provider.

The investment into UKFast is being made by Inflexion’s dedicated minority investment fund, Partnership Capital. The deal sees the firm valued at £405 million, based on £25 million EBITDA.

Founded in 1999 by Lawrence Jones MBE and Gail Jones, UKFast offers cloud and hosting platforms for businesses and government organisations to outsource their critical IT infrastructure. UKFast recently ventured into public cloud providing integration and support for AWS and Azure through its new division ClearCloud.

The business has a customer base of 5,500 UK SME clients and 200 mid-sized companies, which are served by UKFast’s 350 employees across its Manchester campus, London sales office and data centres.

With the IT infrastructure services market worth around £2 billion and estimated to be growing at 9% per annum, UKFast says its strong growth in this market is driven by “a paradigm shift” from on-premise to cloud.

“It has been widely reported about our ambitions to IPO. After spending time in the City meeting fund managers I learned that it is incredibly important to align yourself with people who’ve got experience in areas that you don’t,” said Lawrence Jones.

“When Inflexion threw their hat into the ring, alongside several others, there was an immediate connection. The Inflexion team have got an incredible reputation when they have invested pre-IPO. That reputation, coupled with their team headed up by Carl Wormald and Irina Hemmers is something that gives us great confidence for the future.

“Growing a successful business is all about people. I am so proud of my management team and everyone who works at UKFast, when you think that they’ve grown this business from a spare bedroom in Manchester to where it is now. What’s even more incredible is the potential we have to take UKFast to new heights.

“Huge thanks to the team from GCA Altium, headed up by Phil Adams, and to Howard Gill from Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang. A complex deal like this can’t happen without brilliant people like these.”

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