To Accelerate Growth and Innovation of an SAP Digital Transformation Solution Provider
CHARLOTTE, NC and BOSTON, MA (September 6, 2023) – Ridgemont Equity Partners (“Ridgemont”), a middle market private equity investor, today announced the recapitalization of smartShift (or “the Company”), a leading tech-enabled services provider for SAP custom application migrations, upgrades and transformations. The Company’s current leadership team, including CEO Derek Oats, President & COO Vyom Gupta and CFO Kendall Walker, remain in their current roles and meaningfully invested in partnership with Ridgemont.
“Our key point of differentiation at smartShift is our Intelligent Automation Platform, which produces simplified, modernized and maintainable code that is automatically uploaded into an SAP customer’s targeted system as part of their application upgrade and cloud migration process,” said Derek Oats, CEO of smartShift. “We have built the proprietary solution and proven our value proposition to our customers and Global System Integrator channel partners. In partnership with Ridgemont and the strategic resources they bring to our team, we have an incredible opportunity to accelerate our next phase of growth and further penetrate our large addressable market by optimizing our go-to-market strategy, enhancing our recurring solution offering and continuing to innovate.”
“smartShift offers a unique and efficient automated solution to streamline the highly critical, resource-intensive process of migrating from a legacy SAP ERP platform to a modern cloud-based system,” said Anthony Cassano, Partner at Ridgemont. “Ridgemont is partnering with a talented management team that has been entrenched within the SAP ecosystem for their entire careers and has proven their ability to execute against an innovative vision of digital transformation and application modernization for SAP customers across the globe. We are excited to support the Company with continued growth through product innovation and global sales and marketing expansion.”
Rob Edwards, Managing Partner at Ridgemont, added: “Ridgemont continues to identify very attractive, growing middle market companies that are seeking first-time institutional capital partners to help execute clearly-defined value creation initiatives. Our investment in smartShift fits squarely into our tech-enabled business services practice, which has been built over three decades and is centered around investing in companies that help solve complex and critical workflows and supply chain challenges for customers.”
Canaccord Genuity served as financial advisor to smartShift. Goodwin Procter served as legal advisor to Ridgemont and Goldberg Kohn served as legal advisor to smartShift. Debt financing for the transaction was provided by Barings. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
About smartShift
smartShift offers a better way for SAP customers to migrate and optimize their custom code. With its patented AI-powered solutions, smartShift delivers secure, stable, and optimized code in weeks rather than the months required by conventional approaches. smartShift is trusted by many of the world’s largest SAP customers and has been used to modernize over 3,300 SAP systems, converting over 3 billion lines of code. To learn more, please visit www.smartShift.com
About Ridgemont Equity Partners
Ridgemont Equity Partners is a Charlotte-based middle market private equity firm that has provided buyout and growth capital to industry-leading companies in the business and tech-enabled services, industrial growth, and healthcare sectors for three decades. The principals of Ridgemont have refined a proven, industry-focused model designed to build distinctive middle market companies. For more information, please visit www.ridgemontep.com.
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