Great Hill partners acquires BlueSnap for $115M USD New ownership to fuel continued growth of BlueSnap as the lead

August 8, 2011

Great Hill partners acquires BlueSnap for $115M USD

New ownership to fuel continued growth of BlueSnap as the leading global eCommerce marketing and payment platform for digital goods, online services and SaaS business models.

Fremont, CA, August 8, 2011– (BUSINESS WIRE) – Great Hill Partners announced today the acquisition of BlueSnap Inc., from a shareholder group including Susquehanna Growth Equity LLC, BlueSnap founders, key management members and employees. BlueSnap enables businesses to “take charge” and assume full control of selling digital goods and services online. A business can choose BlueSnap’ simple to implement, hosted and complete application that uniquely spans the entire e-Commerce lifecycle, or it can deploy the new BlueSnap Buy Anyware TM API which allows it to integrate with existing solutions. Both solutions help businesses successfully sell using secure global payments optimizing their ability to build new markets, develop business partnerships, improve sales and monitor performance metrics.

BlueSnap has a rapidly expanding user base of more than 6,500 small to medium size business and rapid growth enterprises worldwide with a platform that supports many business models including SaaS and Cloud based solutions. With this strong growth in its seller base, BlueSnap has experienced equally strong growth in transactions, revenue and profit. Following the close of the transaction, the current senior management team and employees led by CEO Hagai Tal will work with Great Hill Partners to continue carrying out BlueSnap’ long-term business plan.

The e-Commerce landscape is quickly transforming as customer expectations evolve and new forms of digital goods and services like SaaS and video content grow in market share. In fact, industry analyst firm Forrester Research forecasts that the e-Commerce market in just the U.S. alone will reach $300 billion by 2012 with digital goods and services comprising a growing proportion of e-Commerce revenue. In this growing market the popularity and growth of the social web makes it increasingly

important to reach the right prospects with the right offers and make the shopping experience as frictionless as possible. Converting them into paying customers is an even bigger challenge—and keeping them coming back to buy from businesses again and again is truly a science. Focus needs to be on using the right tools like dynamic subscriptions and geographically appropriate payment methods to increase average order value while boosting close rates to make the most of the traffic coming to a virtual store. This is the value of BlueSnap, and increasingly fast growth internet businesses are utilizing BlueSnap to monetize their businesses in these new markets.

“With our solid existing customer base and favorable market trends, we are fortunate to work with Great Hill Partners to expand our ability to capture the opportunities ahead,” said CEO Hagai Tal. “Our BlueSnap teams in the U.S. and Israel will continue to focus on our clients’ successful monetization in an increasingly global, complex and expanding online and mobile world. Our vision of e-Commerce 3.0 and frictionless e-Commerce will fuel these solutions.” Chris Busby, a principal at Great Hill, says: “BlueSnap is an innovative, profitable and rapidly growing company. It represents an exciting opportunity to capitalize on the favorable trends in the digital goods and content sectors. We are excited to partner with management and will provide the additional capital and resources necessary to help BlueSnap expand as well as pursue strategic opportunities.”

After the close of the transaction Matt Vettel, Chris Busby and Nick Cayer from Great Hill will join the BlueSnap Board of Directors.

Raymond James & Associates served as financial advisor to BlueSnap in this transaction.

 

About Great Hill Partners

Great Hill Partners is a private equity firm that manages more than $2.5 billion in capital to finance the expansion, recapitalization or acquisition of growth companies in a wide range of sectors within the business and consumer services, media, communications and software industries. Great Hill targets investments of $25 million to $150 million. For more information, please visit www.greathillpartners.com.

 

About BlueSnap

BlueSnap is a comprehensive global buying platform that fuels growth for companies serving digital, physical and mobile markets. A single dynamic

platform, BlueSnap helps businesses grow faster through a configurable
and flexible approach to eCommerce, Payment
Processing eMarketing and Subscription billing. Businesses can simply integrate BlueSnap’s innovative and powerful BuyNow capability solutions anywhere onto their web sites supporting any merchant buying model. BlueSnap’s global network securely supports over 5,000 online businesses in 145 countries in multiple languages, currencies, payment methods and devices.