Summa Equity is considering launching a process to sell its Norwegian digital document platform provider Documaster in the last quarter of this year, Gisle Gluck Evensen, partner at the sponsor, told Mergermarket.

“We have been going through a transformation [of the company] and would need to finalize this before launching an exit process,” Evensen said. “The company is now profitable and approaching Rule of 40 this year.”

The company expects FY24 revenue to be close to EUR 16m, with EBITDA close to EUR 5m, he said, adding that 80% of the revenue will be recurring. The company became profitable last year, he said.

This news service reported in May that Summa had appointed Bryan, Garnier & Co. to oversee its planned sale of the company, which in FY23 surpassed EUR 12m revenue and 10% EBITDA margin.

“We’ve had some inbounds and have spoken to those that have approached us, but we are not yet doing anything proactively,” Evensen said.

Summa has also started working with a Big Four consultancy on the exit process, he said but declined to name the party. For legal matters, the sponsor has a regular adviser it works with, he said.

Summa Equity has worked with numerous financial and legal advisers on its past deals, as shown on Mergermarket’s database.

Acquisition talks

Meanwhile, Documaster is in talks with acquisition candidates and could close deals before Summa’s exit. “We would need to balance this against our potential exit process,” Evensen said.

The company has a “reasonably” long list of potential targets it monitors, and they are typically smaller, founder-led companies with revenues in the region of EUR 1.5m to EUR 5m, he said.

Documaster, which last year acquired Dutch peer De Ree Archiefsystemen in a deal valued at EUR 10m, is interested in entering other European markets where the digitalisation of the public sector is relatively advanced or accelerating, he said. These include countries such as Finland, Denmark, and the UK. Germany could be interesting too, but it is lagging behind in the digitalisation trend, while Belgium has not shown many acquisition opportunities, he added.

As well as for market entry, the company could also acquire to gain new product extensions to its core archiving offer. “I don’t see Documaster going deep into workflow management, but there are some adjacent areas we could look at adding,” Evensen said.

Summa has a debt partnership with Ture Invest and would expect it to be happy to help if needed. “Ture sits somewhere between an equity and a traditional debt provider with its approach, and Summa has used them in several situations,” Evensen said.

The macroeconomic drivers for Documaster’s business are strong, Evensen said, adding that the archiving business in Norway and the Netherlands is growing by around 30%-40% in revenue per year.