Catalyst Romania, the leading private equity growth and venture capital fund dedicated to Romania, has announced that its portfolio company SmartBill has been acquired by the Norwergian Group Visma. Catalyst Romania invested in SmartBill in 2016 and provided hands on support in Company’s development.
Launched by Ioana Hasan, Radu Hasan and Mircea Capatina in 2007, SmartBill provides invoicing, inventory and accounting services to over 65.000 Romanian SME customers. SmartBill has grown 5 times over the last 4 years, with annual revenue growth rate of more than 50 percent and established itself as the clear market leader in financial and accounting solutions in Romania. Previously SmartBill raised more than 1 million Euro venture capital funding from Catalyst Romania and Gecad Ventures and local business angel investor Lucian Todea. Following the acquisition, founders of SmartBill will maintain operational control of the business and will continue executing the successful growth strategy of SmartBill.
Visma, cloud services market leader in Northern Europe and several other countries, is already present in Romania through its R&D offices in Sibiu and Timisoara (over 500 employees), now becomes an active player in the Romanian market through the acquisition of SmartBill. This new acquisition is in line with Visma’s strategy to produce and deliver the best cloud solutions for managing small and medium-sized businesses in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. SmartBill is a suite of cloud applications of the highest quality, reliability, and ease of use, exactly what Visma is looking for in the Romanian market.
“We found in Visma the ideal partner to help SmartBill move to the next level. Their resources and experience will help us make SmartBill even better, to continue to innovate and make Romanian entrepreneurs’ lives a little easier. I am very proud of SmartBill’s achievements and I want to thank my co-founders, Ioana and Mircea, our investors, and especially our excellent team which we have created, which has played the most important role in our development in most recent years. This transaction is also a confirmation of the fact that our mission of becoming the first software ecosystem for SMEs in Romania is about to be fulfilled, and also that our billing, management and accounting solutions in the cloud are at the level we wanted to reach. Last but not least, I would also like to thank our customers, without them we couldn’t have reached this phase. We have a lot of pleasant surprises for them in the near future, this is the perfect time to be part of the SmartBill ecosystem,” said Radu Hasan, Co-Founder & CEO, about the transaction and SmartBill’s future plans.
“We invested in the excellent entrepreneurial team from SmartBill in 2016 and we are pleased to see that the business has grown more than 5 times since the time of the investment and that a very large European company, strategic in the field of software and technology applications as a Service, decided to invest in the market leader in Romania, SmartBill!” said Marius Ghenea, Managing Partner Catalyst Romania.
Official Press Release can be found here.
About Catalyst Romania
Catalyst Romania is the first private equity and venture capital fund designed for Romania. Initially sponsored by 3TS Capital Partners, one of the leading private equity and venture capital firms in Europe, Catalyst Romania is mainly funded by the European Investment Fund (EIF), through the JEREMIE initiative, co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund. Catalyst Romania is currently managed by a local team based in Romania and aims to make early stage venture capital investments in Romanian SMEs from the Technology, Media and Telecom sectors, with investments in the range of €200,000 up to €2,000,000.
About SmartBill
· Developed in 2007, by entrepreneurs Radu Hasan, Ioana Hasan and Mircea Căpățînă, SmartBill is currently the most used and most appreciated management and billing program on the Romanian market, with over 65,000 customers.
· SmartBill addresses a large range of businesses, from PFAs, small and medium-sized companies, and even multinationals, from all business areas. Through SmartBill, over 2,000,000 invoices are issued monthly and over 4 billion Euro are invoiced annually.
· In 2016, SmartBill benefited from an investment of 1 million Euro from the investment funds Catalyst Romania and Gecad Ventures, which took over by a capital increase operation over 30% of the social shares.
About Visma
· Visma offers software and services that simplify and digitalize key business processes in the private and public sectors.
· The Visma Group operates throughout the Northern region of Europe as well as in Benelux and Central and Eastern Europe.
· With over 10,000 employees, more than 1,000,000 contracted customers and a net income of 1.199 billion Euro in 2018, Visma is one of the largest software companies in Europe.
· For more details visit www.visma.com
· The company registered a turnover of over 10,000,000 lei in the last year, being one of the most important players in the financial-accounting software market.