London, 8th June 2018 – UK lower mid-market investor, Tenzing, today announces that its portfolio company, Smoothwall, has acquired digital safeguarding company, Future Digital.
Smoothwall is the market-leading provider of dynamic web filtering technology for the education and public sectors. Its on-premise and cloud-based offerings filter incoming web traffic in real time to protect school children and other audiences from inappropriate, illegal or harmful websites.
The acquisition of Future Digital adds a highly complementary offering to Smoothwall’s existing portfolio, cementing Smoothwall’s market-leading position in the UK education sector. Future Digital provides real time, cloud-based, monitoring solutions with visual and intuitive dashboards. This complements Smoothwall’s Visigo offering and enables Smoothwall to provide its customers with a wider range of safeguarding solutions.
Smoothwall has an established UK presence and a footprint in the US, covering over 10,000 schools worldwide. This acquisition comes as Smoothwall continues to grow its UK and international presence following the appointment of former Tesla director Georg Ell in May 2018.
Christian Hamilton, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Tenzing commented: “Smoothwall is a high growth, market leader and Future Digital is a strong strategic fit, enhancing Smoothwall’s product offering and expanding its presence in the UK. We were delighted to support Smoothwall’s board with the appointment of Georg as CEO last month and with this their first acquisition.”
Georg Ell, CEO of Smoothwall, commented: “We are thrilled to incorporate Future Digital into Smoothwall, with our two product sets complementing each other well. This will allow us to offer a wider range of safeguarding and filtering services based on our customers’ requirements. Smoothwall has a great reputation across a number of sectors and bringing Future Digital into the fold only strengthens that. In Education alone, we will now be serving over 10,000 schools globally. We believe that safeguarding is a fundamental duty in organisations of all types and sizes and our mission is to support that with robust, powerful, user-friendly solutions.”
Smoothwall’s acquisition of Future Digital is the third portfolio company add-on acquisition that Tenzing has supported in the last nine months. It follows payroll management provider FMP Global’s acquisitions of MCN Associates in September 2017 and PKF Cooper Parry’s payroll division in December 2017.
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