Vodafone Platinum Partner targeting aggressive growth and acquisitions
Olive Communications says it is ready to take the market “by storm” after receiving a £15.25 million funding package.
Dedicated venture capital company BGF (Business Growth Fund), which is backed by major banking groups Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, RBS and Standard Chartered and has capital of up to £2.5 billion, has invested £10 million, while Barclays itself has provided £5.25 million.
It comes after Olive reported revenues of £29 million for the 12 months ending January 31, 2016, up by more than half from £18.9 million in the previous year-long period.
“We have very aggressive growth plans,” Olive CEO Martin Flick (pictured) told Mobile News.
“We want to dominate the market and will achieve that by delivering and obsessing about excellent customer service and making sure that our strategic partners get what they need.
“We have enjoyed a lot of success over the past 15 months selling converged solutions and we will continue to expand in that area. We have some serious heavyweight backing behind us and instead of boxing above our weight, we can really start to take the market by storm.”
Organic growth
The new funding package will be used to expand Olive’s customer base, which currently stands at more than 7,000 businesses. Olive will further develop the range of services it provides, which include mobile, converged solutions, cloud telephony, broadband and data networks through the likes of Vodafone, O2, Microsoft, Gamma and Mitel.
This will initially be achieved through continued organic growth, while midway through this year it will start looking at acquisition opportunities, targeting mobile dealers, fixed line, PBX, WAN and software providers and unified comms specialists it considers outdated and one-dimensional.
Olive’s last purchase was that of risk management software-as-a-service (SaaS) SafetyBank in June 2014 – its tenth buy in two years.