Mid-market private equity firm LDC has made a significant minority investment in Cellhire, a provider of mobile Voice and Data and Internet of Things (IoT) communications services.
Headquartered in York, Cellhire offers high-speed and secure ways for businesses and partners to stay connected worldwide. It has built key partnerships with UK mobile network operators (MNOs) Vodafone, O2 and EE through long established ISP agreements.
Internationally it has developed partnerships with more than 40 MNOs and rolled out its first Full MVNO on the Orange network in France. Recently it has worked with China Unicom at the Beijing Winter Olympics and has established a commercial agreement with Qatari MNO Ooredoo for the FIFA World Cup.
Cellhire serves customers across multiple distribution channels including B2B, B2C, White Label, Partner and M2M/IoT wholesale airtimes from offices in the UK, Germany, France, Japan and the USA.
In recent years the business has invested in the development of Atlas, its Billing and SIM Management Platform as well as expanding its M2M, IoT and eSIM capabilities. This has underpinned strong growth with turnover increasing by 42% between 2019 and 2022, from £19.1m to £27.1m.
LDC is backing the existing management team, led by chairman Tim Williams and group CEO Martyn Stevens. The investment was led by Dan Smith, partner and head of Yorkshire at LDC, alongside investment director Will Scales and investment manager Ana-Maria Garaba.
Tim Williams, chairman at Cellhire, said: “Our team has worked incredibly hard over the last couple of years to strengthen our range of products and services. With LDC’s support we’re now at an exciting stage of our journey to broaden our proposition through technology and service.”
Dan Smith, partner and head of Yorkshire at LDC, added: “We are excited to be backing Tim, Martyn and their team. They are at the forefront of innovation in the sector and we see there is huge scope to grow the business particularly as the business develops its IoT offering and the market opens up to a growing number of use cases. We’re looking forward to supporting them as they continue to expand their proposition across the world.”
Cellhire was advised by KPMG, CiL and Addleshaw Goddard.
LDC was advised by Alantra, Squire Patton Boggs, Strategy& and Grant Thornton.
