Fortino Capital Partners, the European B2B software investor, announced it acquired a majority stake in Bonitasoft from former investors including Bpifrance, Auriga Capital, Serena Capital and Ventech. As part of the transaction, Miguel Valdes and Charles Souillard, who founded Bonitasoft in 2009, will reinvest and team up with Fortino Capital during this new phase of growth.
A state-of-the-art, open-source platform for Digital Process Automation
Bonitasoft is a leading software company active in the field of Digital Process Automation and Intelligent Business Process Management. Featured on the Gartner iBPM Magic Quadrant (2019) & Forrester DPA Wave (2021), the company is best-known for its widely adopted open-source Business Process Management platform, which is used by enterprise customers around the world to model, automate, deploy and continuously improve their business processes.
Counted among Bonita Enterprise clients are blue-chip companies such as Verallia, Crédit Agricole, and Hyster-Yale. Leveraging its community of over 150,000 developers who are furthering the product on a daily basis, Bonitasoft has become their BPM platform of choice for large, complex automation projects in which there is a need to combine deep technical expertise with appropriate visual tools for business users.
Approximately 70 Bonitasoft employees work from the company’s 3 hubs in Grenoble, Paris and San Francisco. Since 2015, the company has repositioned itself, focusing solely on enterprise customers with their demanding IT transformation ambitions and complex needs, relying on a strong network of specialist partners. A new Cloud platform was launched in July 2019, harnessing the breadth and power of the existing technology accumulated over 10 years, but leveraging the benefits of the public Cloud.
Growth opportunities
Supported by Fortino Capital, Bonitasoft’s plan is to accelerate sales of the new Cloud offering, while continue to provide freedom to customers to select the deployment option of their choice (Cloud, on-premise or Hybrid), both directly and via a new partnership strategy, grow into other French- and Spanish-speaking countries across both sides of the Atlantic, as well as extending the platform by delivering a new wave of product innovation in the field of Process Analytics. As part of the investment by Fortino Capital, Edouard Fourcade, a seasoned software executive whose former responsibilities include leadership roles at Anaplan and BMC, will also join the Board of Directors of Bonitasoft as Chairman.
“We are excited to be working with Fortino Capital during this next phase of the Bonitasoft journey,” says Miguel Valdes Faura, CEO and co-founder of Bonitasoft. “First, our customers will benefit from increased investment in R&D for an array of Process Automation tools for the future. This new partnership will also support us in strengthening our customer-centric approach with an even higher attention to sales, pre-sales, support, and customer success to accomplish their business goals. Implementing additional automation tools to equip Bonitasoft's teams will improve our operational effectiveness and amplify customer and partner satisfaction.”
Arnaud de Vos, Investment Director at Fortino Capital Partners, adds: “The market for Digital Process Automation is huge and extremely dynamic. We fully subscribe to Miguel’s and Charles’ mission of democratizing process automation. Process automation is a highly complex domain, and in order to harvest true and lasting benefits from digitisation, we agree with them that development teams should be free and unencumbered to create the best possible business applications. Bonitasoft’s powerful, extensible and customizable platform, built under the leadership of Miguel and Charles, is the answer to that challenge. We are impressed by Bonitasoft’s modern and cloud-native technology stack, its impressive roster of blue-chip clients as well as its strong customer proximity and unparalleled commitment to client satisfaction.”
About Bonitasoft
Bonitasoft fully supports digital operations and modernization of information systems with Bonita, an open source and extensible platform for automation and optimization of business processes. The Bonita platform accelerates development and production with a clear separation between visual programming and coding capabilities. Bonita integrates with existing information systems, orchestrates heterogeneous systems and provides deep visibility across all enterprise processes.
About Fortino Capital
Fortino Capital is an investment company with a focus on B2B software and technology. Our mission is to support ambitious management teams in realizing their growth plans. We invest in young companies (venture capital) and established companies (growth capital) where growth is an integral part of the strategy. Fortino has offices in Belgium and the Netherlands, and invests throughout Europe. Fortino's investment portfolio includes, amongst others, Efficy CRM, Maxxton, Cenosco, MobileXpense, Teamleader, iObeya, Salonkee and Zaion.
