Summa Linguae Technologies Acquires Two North American Companies

Last Updated December 10, 2019

Summa Linguae Technologies took another step on a path of global expansion. We sold a majority stake to V4C investment fund for two acquisitions in North America.

The letter of intent with the private equity fund was signed in October 2019. It regards the acquisition by V4C fund of 51% majority stake in Summa Linguae Technologies (hereinafter referred to as SLT).

The funds were allocated to finance two acquisitions, a Canadian company specializing in data annotation services (Globalme) and an American provider of localization services from the life science sector (GlobalVision).

Today, December 9, 2019, V4C Fund subscribed for SLT’s shares thereby fulfilling the last requirement, and the Company acquired Globalme, Canada, and GlobalVision, USA.

The fund’s entry into the company will not change much for its day-to-day operations. The current material shareholders, Krzysztof Zdanowski and Madhuri Hegde, will continue to be involved with the company holding their respective positions of President of the Management Board and Operational Director. T

he fund will buy back the shares from smaller private investors, while Krzysztof Zdanowski himself stresses that acquisition of a large private equity investor is very beneficial for the company:

Summa Linguae Technologies for 3 years has been investing in foreign companies that have experience in the localization market, but mainly in companies with extensive technological resources. Canadian Globalme excellently matches the profile of companies that SLT’s management is interested in.

This Canadian company established in 2005 was initially offering services around translations and linguistic localization. In reaction to the growing demand and global trends in technologization of the market, the company quickly modified its portfolio of services.

Currently, Globalme is a company focused mainly on new technologies and Big Data, and offering services such as data collection and tagging, semantic analysis or data annotation. All these services are offered with the support of artificial intelligence. The revenues generated by Globalme in 2018 amounted to approx. USD 5 M and its revenues for 2019 are forecasted at the level of USD 6.5 M.

The American GlobalVision Company is primarily an investment in a strong SLT base in the USA, which has long been on SLT’s strategic map of international expansion.

In 2019, Global Vision forecasts a revenue of approx. USD 2 M. Micheline Freij, Managing Director of Global Vision, emphasizes that the synergies that are to be seen in the value proposition offered to customers by SLT in the form of new technologies will not only allow her to increase the company’s revenues by leaps and bounds, but will also provide her with an opportunity for a new, interesting experience of operating in a company with a global reach.

Anna Pietruszka, the Strategic Director at Summa Linguae Technologies, admits that the legalities associated with acquisition of the Canadian and American companies are interesting steps taken towards the development of SLT:

Based on previous acquisition experience we know that transactions of this type can be regarded as successful only after we achieve the synergies in operational activities. The compatibility of the acquired companies along with the value of the acquired technologies with our expectations is a very important determinant of the success of the acquisition process itself, however at the moment we are focusing on implementation of appropriate processes unifying day-to-day operation of branches in Poland, Romania, India, Scandinavia, Canada and the USA.

Zdanowski adds:

We approach this challenge with a lot of excitement, the technological direction has been chosen by us a few years ago already, the acquisition of new technologies is very consistent with our strategy. We share with Globalme a common vision of using the latest trends based on artificial intelligence in management of multilingual content. This type of activity is complementary to our operations to date on e-commerce, IT and e-learning markets. This provides a very strong base for expansion with this type of services also on the USA market.

SLT paid USD 2.5 M for Global Vision and USD 7 M for Globalme. Also, the earn-out mechanism has been used in the case of transaction with Globalme – depending on the result of the Canadian company the adjustment upwards may amount to USD 2.5 M.

The envisaged consolidated revenues of Summa Linguae Technologies for 2019 will amount to USD 20–21 M, and the number of employees will exceed 200.

SLT’s advisors in this transaction were the law firm of CK Legal Chabasiewicz, Kowalska i Partnerzy and EY Corporate Finance

Krzysztof Zdanowski
krzysztof.zdanowski@summalinguae.com

785 121 161

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