Cube Infrastructure Managers (Cube), the independent mid-market infrastructure investor, has agreed to acquire firstcolo datacenters GmbH (firstcolo), a Frankfurt-based data centre business and provider of colocation, dedicated servers, managed services and private cloud solutions. The acquisition is made by Cube Infrastructure Fund III.
Cube is acquiring firstcolo from funds advised by EMERAM Capital Partners (EMERAM), one of the leading investment companies for medium-sized companies in the German-speaking region and its portfolio company diva-e Excellence GmbH (diva-e). As a business development partner, EMERAM actively supports the growth of diva-e.
The parties have agreed not to disclose any financial details on the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions.
firstcolo owns two state-of-the-art Tier III+ data centres in Frankfurt which are 100% powered by green electricity. The business was founded in 2007 and expanded through the acquisition of Accelerated IT in 2017.
Since welcoming EMERAM and diva-e as new majority shareholders, the management team achieved substantial growth of firstcolo’s revenues and profitability around its core colocation offering, as well as by entering new high-growth areas such as private cloud solutions. firstcolo’s strong ‘platform’ characteristics and significant growth prospects supported by an increasing demand for colocation and cloud solutions across Germany represent an attractive proposition for Cube’s buy-and-grow strategy.
“Cube IM invests in businesses which capitalise on megatrends driving the need for sustainable infrastructure,” said Stéphane Calas, Partner at Cube Infrastructure Managers. “In the digital sector, Cube has conducted a dozen transactions since 2008, partnering with talented management teams to achieve strong and sustainable growth. We believe firstcolo to be very well positioned to address the increasing needs of German SMEs in terms of colocation and cloud services, with the ability to anticipate the future needs of customers. Our team is very excited to join forces with Jerome and Nicolaj, firstcolo’s management team and founders to write the next growth chapter of the Company.”
“We are proud to have supported firstcolo to become one of the leading and most efficient data centre players in the Frankfurt region with a differentiated and customer-centric value proposition. It has been a pleasure to partner with Jerome Evans and Nicolaj Kamensek who have done a fantastic job in executing the joint value creation plan which we foresaw at the time of the original acquisitions,” said Alexis Tran-Viet, Partner at EMERAM.
“Through the cooperation with diva-e and EMERAM, firstcolo has developed from a founder-led company to a platform to capture significant growth potential,” said Jerome Evans, CEO at firstcolo. “Over the past five years, we more than doubled our revenue and assets and expanded into new areas such as private cloud.
“With Cube, we have gained a long-term-oriented owner who will support us with our ambition to expand the platform and to triple in size. Our goal is to build more data centres in the future that have industry-leading PUE values in terms of energy efficiency. Together, we will continue our journey of growth and digitalisation.”
