North Plains Receives Investment From Accel-KKR

One of our featured DAM vendors, North Plains, has announced that technology private equity investment firm, Accel-KKR has made a ‘substantial investment’ into their business.  Hassan Kotob, Executive Chairman of North Plains commented:

“Today’s global marketing organizations are struggling to keep pace with the growing volume of rich media and new distribution channels. Since its inception, North Plains has focused exclusively on the needs of the digital media market, enabling companies of all sizes to do more, faster with their rich media.  With Accel-KKR we are now able to accelerate our vision to create a single, global company focused on rich media management and reshape the industry for years to come.” [Read More]

Accel-KKR has equity investments in a number of other leading brands and tech companies, including: Facebook, Foundry Networks, AMCC, Agile Software, Portal Software and were also investors in Macromedia (prior to the Adobe acquisition).

The investment into North Plains follows funding received by Belgian DAM vendor, ADAM last year and indicates an increasing interest in pure-play Digital Asset Management vendors by private equity investors.  At present, no positions (that we are aware of) have been taken in pure-play SaaS or Open Source DAM vendors, but whether that is due to a perceived poor potential for growth or just because they have failed to appear on investor’s radars remains to be seen.

Certainly, both SaaS and Open Source alternatives have the potential to frustrate customer acquisition at the Enterprise end of the market which might encourage consolidation, a trend which we believe will commence in the medium term because of the number of competing providers.

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