VIA Equity takes majority stake in Decision Focus

VIA Equity acquired a 75% majority stake in Decision Focus in November 2022, from founder and chief executive Jon Tollerup, who had owned the entire company until then. It was the first outside investment in the business, which Tollerup had begun seeking a year earlier. The transaction valued the company at an enterprise value of DKK 100–350M, an EV/EBITDA multiple of 5x–12x on expected EBITDA for the year, against an EBITDA of DKK 5–25M the previous year on a gross profit of close to seventeen million kroner. Founded in 2004, Decision Focus develops governance, risk and compliance software. Its platform lets an organisation record the risks it faces, the controls meant to contain them and the regulations it must observe, then track audits, incidents and reporting obligations in one system rather than across separate spreadsheets. Clients configure their own modules without writing code, across more than twenty of them covering audit, risk, compliance, governance, information security and regulatory reporting. Its customers are banks, insurers and other organisations in regulated industries, serving more than 70,000 users, from offices in Denmark, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Romania. Demand for this software has been driven by the accumulation of regulation in financial services, where each new requirement adds obligations an institution must demonstrate it has met, and where supervisors expect evidence rather than assurances. Compliance teams that managed those obligations on spreadsheets have had to replace them with systems that record who did what and when. VIA Equity backed the company’s international expansion, its product development and the building of partnerships.