ACL Accelerates Category Consolidation Vision with $50 Million Strategic Investment from Norwest

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ACL

Dec 19, 2017, 08:00 ET

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- ACL, the SaaS provider helping governments and the world's largest companies quantify risk, stamp out fraud, and optimize performance, today announced that it has accepted a $50 million strategic minority investment led by the growth equity team at Norwest. The new investment will be used to accelerate the company's consolidation of the $36 billion integrated risk and performance software market. As a privately held, self-funded business, this is the first time in ACL's history that it has taken an outside capital investment. 

"Today's announcement is validation of the transformation we have already driven and a strong vote of confidence in our belief that we are best positioned to dominate the massive and underserved market for risk and performance management software," said Laurie Schultz, president and CEO of ACL. "We are already a fast-growing company, having doubled our SaaS GRC business in each of the last five years, and sought an investment partner able to support and accelerate our vision. Norwest shares our focus on driving success through a balanced focus on employees, customers, and financials, all enabled by a strong corporate culture. This, in combination with Norwest's industry experience and strategic resources makes for an ideal collaboration."

Just as CRM software aligns the activities of sales, marketing and customer success teams to deliver greater revenues and an enhanced customer experience, ACL aligns the activities of operations, finance, risk, compliance, and audit teams to deliver enhanced governance and more reliable execution of organizational strategy. More than 7,000 existing customers in 140 countries worldwide work with ACL to manage risk, detect fraud, identify operational waste, and efficiently comply with industry regulation.

"ACL is the world's largest pure play multi-tenant SaaS GRC provider. Modern product design, a big data analytics engine, and deep subject matter expertise clearly set the company apart.  ACL already has scale, an industry-changing vision, and an impressive customer base. We believe it is the company's outstanding culture that will drive success in the fractured risk and performance management software space," said Robert Arditi, partner at Norwest. "From the leadership team through research and development and on to sales and marketing, every employee at ACL is completely invested in the vision. That's the kind of alignment that creates a category killer."

ACL is frequently cited as an industry innovator and is an eight-time winner of the GRC 20/20 GRC Technology Awards in categories ranging from technology innovation to user experience to customer value realization. Taking advantage of a SaaS delivery strategy, new product innovation is shared in real time with customers as new capabilities are released. The company's Fall 2017 Release adds real-time enterprise risk assessment through intelligent data automation as well as tightly integrated, industry-specific GRC content and intelligence.

"The GRC software market is growing because more risk management professionals see GRC platforms as a way to address their top challenges of complexity and scale," wrote Renee Murphy, principal analyst serving Security & Risk Professionals at Forrester Research Inc. "As the GRC market continues to mature, and as new competitors struggle to gain a foothold, some of the legacy vendors are getting complacent with their technology roadmap and not keeping up with the more advanced features and design that customers are seeing in other business applications."[1]

Marks Baughan served as financial advisor to ACL on this transaction.

To learn more about ACL and its solutions for integrated risk, compliance, and audit management, please visit www.acl.com.

About Norwest
Norwest is a leading Silicon-Valley based venture capital and growth equity investment firm managing more than $6 billion in capital. Since our inception, we have invested in more than 600 companies. The firm invests in early to late stage companies across a wide range of sectors with a focus on consumer, enterprise, and healthcare. We offer a deep network of connections, operating experience, and a wide range of impactful services to help CEOs and founders advance on their journey. Norwest has offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, with subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel. For more information, please visit Norwest. Follow Norwest on Twitter @NorwestVP.

Supporting Resources:

© 2017 ACL Services Ltd. ACL and the ACL logo are registered trademarks of ACL Services Ltd. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

[1] The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q1 2016, Forrester Research, Inc., Jan. 22, 2016.

SOURCE ACL

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