Surrey: BGF completes multi-million pound investment

BGF, the UK’s most active investor in growth economy businesses, has completed a multi-million-pound investment in Cirrus, an award-winning provider of omnichannel cloud contact centre solutions.

Founded in 2013 by Jason Roos, Cirrus’ software is used by private and public sector organisations looking to digitalise their customer service operations. The business has seen continued growth across the UK and North America making it one of the leading Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platforms.

Surrey-based Cirrus’ technology allows businesses to interact with their customers across a wide range of digital channels (email, video, messaging and social media) in addition to traditional voice. All customer communications, regardless of channel, are aggregated into a single view which gives the contact centre agent the full picture of customer contacts and promotes a quick and efficient response. The software has been shown to transform contact centre operations by reducing waiting and issue resolution times, increasing customer satisfaction and drastically reducing costs.

Cirrus’ client base spans a broad range of sectors including finance, logistics, government, travel and retail. BGF’s investment will be used to grow the company’s sales and development team to service its channel partner relationships, building on the already highly successful relationship with Gamma Telecom.

Roos, chief executive officer at Cirrus, commented: “BGF was selected as the preferred partner given the flexibility of its funding and its long-term approach to equity-based investments. We’ve been growing rapidly and as a result of the funding we’re looking to double down on our sales trajectory, bringing more clients onto the Cirrus platform than ever before, and quickly realising our ambition of becoming the leader in the contact centre market.

“The BGF team showed unrivalled expertise, insight and experience in growing disruptive tech businesses and we look forward to working with them on the next phase of our journey.”

Cirrus operates in the rapidly growing CCaaS market. The ongoing migration of IT systems onto the cloud has been a key trend driving growth in this field, alongside increased business appetite for software that improves customer engagement and the movement towards non-voice communications.

Rahul Satsangi, investor at BGF, led the deal alongside Zahir Kasmani. Satsangi said: “Cirrus represents an exciting opportunity to scale a fast-growth software business. With a large, unpenetrated market, a strong product offering and impressive channel partnerships we’re looking forward to partnering with Jason and his team to support Cirrus realise its growth ambitions.”

NatWest has also provided Cirrus with lending as part of today’s announcement. The Growth Capital loan from NatWest will complement the investment by BGF to help Cirrus further capitalise on the opportunities ahead of it.

Kit Maclaren, director at NatWest Growth Capital, commented on the deal: “We are delighted to work with Cirrus, and their new investor BGF, as their business scales up. Their strong technology product puts them in a great position to capitalise on the excellent growth prospects in front of them. Through NatWest’s dedicated Growth Capital fund, we shaped this financing around their specific needs to support them as they scale and drive innovation. We look forward to working with them to achieve their aspirations for the company.”

The advisors to the transaction were:

• BGF: Darren Hart (financial due diligence), Panamoure (technology due diligence) K&L Gates (legal advisors) and GT (tax advisors)