H.I.G. Growth Partners Completes Sale of Lancope Inc.
BOSTON – December 28, 2015 – H.I.G. Growth Partners (“H.I.G. Growth”), the dedicated growth capital investment affiliate of H.I.G. Capital (“H.I.G.”), a leading global private equity investment firm, announces the sale of its investment in Lancope Inc. (“Lancope” or the “Company”) to Cisco Systems, Inc.
Founded in 2000, Lancope (www.lancope.com) is a leading cyber security company that provides network visibility and security intelligence to protect enterprises against top threats. Enterprise customers worldwide, including healthcare, financial services, government and higher education institutions, rely on Lancope to make better network decisions, respond faster to network problem areas and avoid costly outages and downtime – at a fraction of the cost of conventional network monitoring solutions.
H.I.G. led the Company’s first institutional financing round in 2002. H.I.G. continued to support the Company in the years since its initial investment and worked diligently in partnership with the Company’s other investors, board members and management as the Company enhanced its technology and executed its growth plan. H.I.G. was the Company’s largest shareholder at the time of its sale to Cisco.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $452.5 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus additional retention based incentives for Lancope employees who join Cisco. Cisco and Lancope will advance Cisco’s Security Everywhere strategy, enabling network security, visibility, and response across the extended network. With Lancope, Cisco’s portfolio of security solutions adds an additional capability of network behavior analytics that extends protection further into the network.
John Black, H.I.G. Growth Partner’s Managing Director and Lancope board member commented, “Lancope is a strong company with market leading technology and an extremely talented management team. We are proud to have been the first institutional investor in the company and our partnership with the other Board members and management to guide the Company in the development and execution of its growth plan. This investment will provide an attractive return for H.I.G. and its investors, and is a testament to H.I.G. Growth’s ability to be a value-add growth investor and partner to management teams in high-growth technology businesses.”
H.I.G. remains very active in the technology sector, with recent investments including Boostability, Centerfield, Go2mobi, HelpSystems, Intelius, ATX Networks, and Milestone Technologies.
About H.I.G. Growth Partners
H.I.G. Growth Partners is the dedicated growth capital investment affiliate of H.I.G. Capital, a leading global private equity investment firm with $19 billion of equity capital under management.* We seek to make both majority and minority investments in strong, growth oriented businesses located throughout North America, South America and Europe. We will invest $5 million to $30 million in equity in a given company and target investments in profitable growth oriented businesses with between $10 million and $100 million in revenues. We consider investments across all industries, but focus on certain high-growth sectors where H.I.G. has extensive in-house expertise such as technology, healthcare, internet and media, consumer products and technology-enabled financial and business services. Growth Partners strives to work closely with our management teams to serve as an experienced resource, providing broad-based strategic, operational, recruiting and financial management services from a vast in-house team and a substantial network of third-party relationships. For more information, please refer to the H.I.G. website at www.HIGgrowth.com.
* Based on total capital commitments to funds managed by H.I.G. Capital and its affiliates.