IMAP advises the shareholders of Kesselheld GmbH on the sale to Italian Ariston Thermo Group

The Italian Ariston Thermo Group (Ariston) has acquired the majority of shares in Kesselheld GmbH (Kesselheld), one of the leading digital start-ups in heating installations in Germany.

With a well-known integrated online platform, which generates over 5 million page impressions annually, Kesselheld offers heating installation and maintenance services in Germany. On this basis, Kesselheld digitized the majority of the customer process around the heating change from the configuration to the virtual inspection of the boiler room.

The company founders, Martin Teichmann and Sascha Camilli, will continue to hold a minority stake and remain Managing Director of the Company. Kesselheld will remain an independent player in the comfort heating segment in Germany, continuing to provide customers with distinctive multi-brand heating installations leveraging the digital channel. The company is headquartered in Dusseldorf, Germany and currently has around 80 employees.

Handwerksunion GmbH, a fully-owned subsidiary of Kesselheld dedicated to installation, was carved-out from the transaction perimeter, as not of strategic focus for Ariston.

Ariston, headquartered in Fabriano in central Italy, is one of the leading international groups in the thermal and heating technology sector. The company produces and sells i.a. condensing boilers, water heaters, burners, heat pumps and air conditioning systems. The company has direct commercial activities in 41 countries globally, and generated in 2019 over EUR 1.7 billion, with almost 8,000 employees globally.

“With this acquisition, Ariston joins forces with a young, digital-native start-up to reinforce digital know-how on the online-to-offline customer journeys”, explains Gabriele Montesi, EVP of Ariston, highlighting that “in parallel, the Group will continue to serve the German premium market with its established ELCO brand, solutions and partner networks, operating in continuity with today’s route-to-market, operations and organization’s set-up”.

"Ariston is for us the ideal strategic partner, whose comprehensive expertise and vertical market knowledge will provide us with important impulses for the further development of our business model. We are very much looking forward to working together in the Ariston family and would like to thank IMAP for their professional and dedicated support throughout the entire M&A process", emphasizes Martin Teichmann, CEO and founder of Kesselheld.

"We are pleased to have found in Ariston a buyer with a strong strategic rationale. This creates a setup with all the prerequisites to further promote digitization in the heating market", comments Henning Graw, Managing Director of IMAP.

The IMAP-team with Henning Graw, Alexander Grund and Sebastian Dinklage exclusively advised the shareholders of Kesselheld throughout a structured M&A process and supported them in negotiating and successfully closing the transaction.