But now, employee experience giant Edenred has moved to buy Reward Gateway. The acquisition will be financed by a €1 billion bridge loan, plus €300 million in debt refinancing, and the deal values Reward Gateway at £1.5 billion, thereby transforming it into the latest HR tech unicorn.
Talking about the deal, Abry Partners’ partner Brian St Jean and principal Austin Heiman commented: “It was a pleasure supporting the Reward Gateway team over the last two years as we partnered with Castik Capital to help transform the business into a leading global SaaS engagement platform.
“We believe the business is poised to continue building on its market-leading position and we are confident that Edenred is the right partner to further accelerate the company’s exceptional performance.”
Clearly, spring 2023 is a promising period for HR tech deals, and particularly in Europe.
For Edenred, its purchase of Reward Gateway is core to its Beyond 22-25 plan; essentially, Edenred wants to build the world’s most trusted global employee benefits and engagement platform.
The deal will particularly help Edenred to enter two new markets: the US and Australia. Reward Gateway serves 4,000 customers and eight million employees across these two markets, plus the UK.
Plus the acquisition helps Edenred move deeper into its bread and butter (pardon the pun) of meal and food benefits.
But Reward Gateway will also bring breadth to Edenred as it offers a full suite of benefits and rewards, particularly in the wellbeing space, as well as being a communication and recognition platform.
This is Edenred’s 30th acquisition in a decade – the latest include GOintegro, which helped it penetrate the Latin America market, as well as Greenpass, which strengthened its fuel benefits offerings.
Talking about the Reward Gateway deal, Edenred CEO and chairman Bertrand Dumazy stated: “By integrating this leading employee engagement platform, we are substantially extending our employee benefits offer to provide HR managers with a comprehensive range of solutions helping them make their organization more attractive to talents.
“While Reward Gateway is bringing us leading positions in the UK and in Australia, as well as a promising presence in the US market, we will be looking at scaling Reward Gateway outside of its current footprint in selected key countries.
“With a business model based on an efficient and fully scalable SaaS platform, Reward Gateway has been consistently delivering strong double-digit growth and high margins.”
Reward Gateway CEO Nick Burns added: “The combination of Reward Gateway’s operations and technology with Edenred’s position as a global market leader across one million corporate clients in 45 countries, offers an accelerated path to achieve our mission of ‘making the world a better place to work’.
“As we will aim at a single unified platform, we will benefit from economies of scale to build tailored solutions for specific markets.
“Bringing together our collective strengths, from commercial reach to product innovation and advanced technology, will be putting us in a position to provide HR leaders with a truly market-beating solution.”
