Talent management vendor Authoria (profile; site) has been acquired by private investment firm Bedford Funding for $63.1 million.
The deal leaves intact Authoria’s management team including founder and CEO Tod Loofbourrow, who said that the acquisition “brings us an investor well matched to the size of the market opportunity before us.” Bedford will inject an additional $8 million in working capital to accelerate Authoria’s expansion.
The price is half the $128 million that Taleo (profile; site) paid for Vurv (profile; site) just six months ago. Both companies had similar staffing levels, but Vurv’s 2007 revenues were around $40 million, while Hoover’s, the business reporting service, estimated Authoria saw about $17 million that year.
Vurv was probably also in better financial shape. Since being founded in 1997 Authoria raised some $100 million in venture capital, including $58 million raised by Hire.com, a company Authoria acquired in 2005. It evidently also had some debt, since Loofbourrow pointedly notes in the announcement that “Bedford Funding will provide us with a debt-free capital structure.”
Jason Corsello, writing in his blog, The Human Capitalist, called the deal a recapitalization observing that existing investors shareholders, which include senior management, as well as the VC firms, would probably only receive “only a fraction of the investment and value.”
Even so, he is encouraged about the company’s prospects for the long term saying it “creates a much cleaner structure for the company to really attack the market as the first vendor that can truly bring together talent acquisition/recruiting with the rest of the talent management suite.”