IMAP advises the shareholders of Catalysts on joining Cloudflight, a newly founded portfolio company of DBAG

Catalysts GmbH, headquartered in Linz, becomes part of Cloudflight, an IT service company focusing on digitization and cloud transformation. The formation of Cloudflight is the result of the acquisition of majority stakes in Austrian Catalysts GmbH and German Crisp Research AG by DBAG Fund VII, advised by Deutsche Beteiligungs AG, as part of an MBO. The founders of Catalysts will re-invest significantly alongside several other executives. In addition, an employee participation program will be set up. Completion is still subject to antitrust approval and is scheduled for June 2019; the parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price.

Catalysts (www.catalysts.cc) is a service provider specialized in agile software development. For more than 10 years, they have been implementing demanding digitization projects for large corporations and hidden champions from the upper middle class – always “on time and on budget”. With a focus on emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Virtual Reality and Big data, Catalysts develops individual and innovative solutions in the sectors “Mobility”, “Financial Services”, “Public” and ”Space”. With almost 300 employees at several locations in Austria, Romania, Germany and most recently also in the Netherlands, the company has been voted as one of the most popular employers for highly qualified software developers for years and records more than 2,000 applications per year. Every employee has achieved a very good result in the Catalysts Coding Contest (https://register.codingcontest.org/), which the company has established as the largest on-site programming competition in Europe - with almost 4,000 participants most recently. Since its foundation, Catalysts has been profitable and has grown by an average of more than 30% per year.
 
For the founders Christoph Steindl and Christian Federspiel, the new structure combined with a financially strong partner and Crisp Research offers new opportunities for customers and employees: "We are now in a position to pursue a European growth strategy, which will mean exciting areas of activity and attractive locations for our software developers. In addition, we can offer our customers a comprehensive service portfolio that includes strategic consulting, increased investment in pay-per-use solutions and 24/7 cloud operations, particularly of data-driven applications.

An IMAP team led by Dr. Carsten Lehmann, Marco Minnerup and Martin Michalek exclusively advised the founders of Catalysts in all phases of a structured transaction process.