Mu Sigma, a provider of analytics and decision support services for global enterprise customers, has closed a USD108 million investment round led by General Atlantic. This is believed to be the biggest private-equity investment made to date in the emerging market for analytics services, and follows Mu Sigma’s April 2011 USD25 million round led by Sequoia Capital (which also participated in this latest round, raising its stake in the company).
Mu Sigma is a professional services firm that provides its clients with a competitive edge by helping them to institutionalise decision support and analytics within their organisations in a sustainable, recurring manner using a global delivery model. Mu Sigma works with market-leading companies across multiple verticals, solving high-impact business problems in the areas of Marketing, Supply Chain and Risk Analytics. With more than 50 Fortune 500 clients and 1500 analytics professionals, Mu Sigma is a category-defining company that has pioneered a new era in the analytics and decision sciences industry by integrating the disciplines of applied math, business and technology.
Mu Sigma is already profitable and can finance its own operations, but will use the investment funds to accelerate its growth in the burgeoning analytics services market. A portion of the proceeds are being used to purchase shares held by existing shareholders, all of whom will continue to have stakes in the company. The investment represents a broadening of the firm’s shareholder support and a strong endorsement by General Atlantic, one of the world’s largest growth equity investors with a successful 31-year track record.
Earlier this year, global consulting firm McKinsey issued a research report estimating that the universe of digital information will increase another 20-fold by the year 2020. In that same report, McKinsey predicts that in order for businesses to handle an explosion of “Big Data” – defined as data sets too big to be readily handled by today’s database technology – another 140,000-190,000 deep analytical talent positions need to be created in the coming years*. Mu Sigma is helping to fill that void.
The company has grown rapidly since its founding in 2004; in fact, its 2008-2010 revenue growth of 886 percent earned Mu Sigma a spot in the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
“We are excited to partner with the clear market leader in the rapidly emerging field of analytics and decision sciences for large global enterprises,” says Bill Ford (pictured), CEO of GA, who will be joining the Mu Sigma board. “We have long known and admired Mu Sigma for the strength of its management team and its innovative service offerings. The Big Data phenomenon is creating huge challenges for corporations as they look to better harness information to accelerate and improve decision making, and Mu Sigma is an excellent antidote. We look forward to working together in continuing to build a globally pre-eminent analytics company.”
Shailendra Singh, Managing Director at Sequoia Capital, says: “Mu Sigma has world-class analytics capabilities, a unique operating model and a refreshing and unconventional culture that continues to create tremendous client impact for dozens of Fortune 500 companies. We are delighted to back the company in its mission to institutionalize decision sciences in corporations.”
“General Atlantic brings a global perspective, experience and relationships that will be very valuable to us as we continue our growth globally,” says Dhiraj Rajaram, Founder and CEO of Mu Sigma. “We greatly value the network and expertise GA will add and look forward to a strong partnership. With General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital as investors, we now have both a world-class private-equity firm and a world-class venture capital firm behind us. Their experience and connections will be extremely valuable as we take Mu Sigma to the next stage of growth.”
