YFM leads £4.5m funding round for data analytics firm
Summary
Funds managed by YFM Equity Partners (YFM) have led a \xa34.5m investment round for a data analytics business.Plandek, based in London, was established by Charlie Ponsonby and Dan Lee and has been trading since 2018.The companys platform works by mining data from development teams DevOps toolsets to provide intelligent insight across the end-to-end software delivery process.Plandek is used by enterprise customers globally in the private and public sectors and widely across PE-owned portfolio companies, including by over ten Hg Capital portfolio companies. It is also recognised as a leading global vendor in the area of DevOps known as Value Stream Management by Gartner and Forrester.The growth capital investment provided by YFM through its British Smaller Companies VCTs will enable the business to scale up its sales and marketing capacity and continue to invest ahead of the curve in product leadership.Plandek chief executive at Charlie Ponsonby, who previously founded Simplifydigital which was subsequently acquired by Dixons Carphone, said: "This fund raise enables us to leverage our global reputation - by extending our intelligent analytics IP and scaling our sales and marketing effort across Europe and North America. "Roshan Puri, investment director at YFM, added: "With its ability to translate software development data and processes into business metrics, Plandek is helping software engineering teams through to c-suite leaders make data-driven decisions in a way that has been commonplace in other areas of an organisation such as sales or finance, for example. A particularly successful route to market has proved to be via operating partners at large cap PE firms, where there is a real focus on value creation. "The YFM Investment team comprised of Roshan Puri,Tiffany Young, Jamie Roberts, and Jonathan Marlow of YFM will be joining the board of Plandek.Eversheds provided legal due diligence; Pegafund (financial); Sonia Alllison-Penny (management); Crosslake (technology); Moreno (marketing); Sales Blueprint (sales); DTE Group (tax); and Kent Finance (financial modelling).YFM has offices in London, Leeds, Manchester, Reading and Birmingham.