Medifox

Private Equity Manager (GP)

Case study

About the company

Medifox is a leading provider of software solutions to over 16,000 outpatient care services, elderly care homes, therapist practices, youth care institutions and non-professional caregivers in Germany. The business supports care providers with key challenges including resource and route planning, care documentation, regulatory compliance and quality assurance of services provided, as well as invoicing systems. Medifox is characterised by a leading position in a fragmented sector, a robust financial profile, a highly competent management team and a “mission-critical” product. The company is headquartered in Hildesheim, Germany and employs over 500 people across six locations.

Investment rationale

• Medifox is a highly attractive business with a fragmented small and medium-sized business (“SMB”) customer base, a high retention and mission-critical, regulatory-driven product that is used daily.
• Medifox is benefiting from fundamental trends of integrated care, an ageing population and digitialisation driving underlying growth for the coming decades.
• Further growth is expected in the core outpatient segment, with tangible mergers and acquisition opportunities to further gain sector share in newer therapy and in-patient segments.
• Opportunities to make operational improvements led by a strong management team and operators.

Our relationship

Pantheon has been a longstanding investor with the manager having backed several mid-cap Hg Capital (“Hg”) funds since 2006. In addition, Pantheon holds advisory board seats for all of the Hg funds that it is invested in.

Active management and value creation

Medifox has grown substantially as a result of several of Hg’s initiatives since 2018, including:

• Achieving annualised organic revenue growth of over 10% via new customer wins and delivering adjacent functionality. This resulted in annualised revenue growth which was over 30% better than the peer average.
• Driving product and service innovation for the customers via the largest dedicated elderly care software research and development team in Germany (e.g. the new next-generation cloud-ready elderly care product).
• Driving digitalisation of sales and investing in systems landscape to deliver strong incremental margins, expanding EBITDA margins over time.
• Building a repeatable mergers and acquisition platform, with the execution and integration of nine acquisitions, including DAN Produkte.

Exit

Medifox was acquired by the US-listed strategic buyer, ResMed, a global leader in cloud-connected medical devices and out-of-hospital software-as-a-service (SaaS) business solutions, in a transaction valuing the business at an estimated US$1bn. PIP made a return of 4.1x on the original cost and a 40% IRR.