Big news today for LumApps, the French startup that describes itself as an “intranet super app” with a platform for building and provisioning internal communications and apps for workforces. The company, used by some 5 million people across 700 organizations, said private equity firm Bridgepoint is taking a majority stake in the company in what it is describing as a $650 million deal and strategic investment.
As part of the transaction, all of LumApps’ existing investors — including the growth divisions of Goldman Sachs, Eurazeo, Bpifrance and IRIS — are expected to sell their stakes in the company.
LumApps’ founders, including its CEO Sebastien Ricard, and senior management will stay on board and also keep stakes in the business. The transaction is expected to close in July 2024. The full valuation of the company, and the size of the stake that Bridgepoint is taking, are not being disclosed.
Its previous investors are seeing a nice win out of this deal, however, as LumApps was last valued at just $255 million at its most recent funding, according to PitchBook. The startup has been biding its time on what appears to be a lean operation: That last round, for $70 million, was way back in 2020. Eurazeo, in its own statement, describes itself as the startup’s biggest investor with more than 30% of the company prior to the deal; it said it alone is netting gross sale proceeds of more than €210 million.
The deal will give LumApps a big nest egg to make acquisitions and scale its business. The company already works with a lot of large French enterprises like Airbus, Publicis Sapient and Groupe Lafayette, and it has a strong international business with the likes of Electronic Arts and Japan Airlines. Yahoo, TechCrunch’s parent company, has also been a customer.
It integrates with hundreds of the usual suspects in enterprise productivity and IT, including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Workday, ServiceNow, Zoom, Salesforce, Box, SAP SuccessFactors and more.
LumApps needs the investment because it plays in a competitive market that is catered to by a variety of players. It has close competitors like Haystack but it also needs to contend with companies that approach serving business intranet needs from different areas — Workday attacks that problem from a human resources angle, while Slack focuses on workplace communications.
Notably it’s not a market for the faint of heart. One of Meta’s early ideas for Workplace was to position it as a platform for intranet communications. But it failed to find the right product-market fit and the appetite to pursue enterprise internal comms, so Meta will soon be shutting down Workplace completely.
The infusion of funds could signal more M&A in this space. LumApps has been making acquisitions already, most recently acquiring Teach on Mars to bring learning to its platform.
Although AI has become very much a buzzword in enterprise tech these days, LumApps has had an ambition of building out an AI-powered personal assistant for years, and it seems that will be another major area of investment going forward. The company will be putting more into the concept of a “generative AI companion” as well as micro-learning, it said in a statement.
