Sumeru Equity Partners buys majority stake in SocialChorus with $100M investment

AnukritiJuly 15, 2020

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SocialChorus, a startup that helps distribute communications internally in a similar way marketers reach customers externally, announced a $100 million investment today led by Sumeru Equity Partners. With this investment, the firm has bought a majority stake in the company. As part of today’s deal, Sumeru will be adding three members to the SocialChorus board.

“Sumeru Equity Partners is making a majority investment in the company but also well capitalizing the business for future growth,” Mark Haller, principal at Sumeru.
The company previously raised $47 million, according to Crunchbase data. Haller says this is not a buyout, so much as a partnership with those previous investors. “We’re seeing continued partnership with existing investors and we’re coming in and making that majority investment, and we’ll also be making another investment in the balance sheet,” he said.

What Sumeru is getting is a company that helps with internal communications using marketing techniques, says company CEO Gary Nakamura. “You can run campaigns with targeting segmentation and all the telemetry back that you need as a leader, as a manager, as an organization to understand how your communications are landing with your workforce,” Nakamura.
The target is large companies and customers include big names like Ford, Archer Daniels Midland and Boeing. The company reports it has 120 large customers around the world, and the business has been growing at 50% year over year.
While the company is getting this infusion of cash from Sumeru, Nakamura says he will continue to try and manage the company in a thoughtful way, and that means being careful about how they hire beyond the 120 employees the company already has.
“What we have built is a business that doesn’t require a lot of heads to run it. We can maintain a 50% growth rate with financial discipline that we’ve implemented. Historically that is what we’ve been able to do,” he said.
Sumeru Equity Partners is a private equity firm based in San Francisco. It targets mid-market companies, according to the company website and then tries to apply operational efficiency by working with them on areas like product strategy, go-to-market acceleration and organizational development with the goal of building up the company and taking it to exit.