Mid-market private equity firm LDC has made a significant minority investment in Cellhire, a global provider of mobile Voice and Data and Internet of Things (IoT) communications services.
Headquartered in York, Cellhire offers high-speed and secure ways for businesses and partners to stay connected worldwide. It has built key partnerships with UK mobile network operators (MNOs) Vodafone, O2 and EE through long established ISP agreements. Internationally it has developed partnerships with more than 40 MNOs and rolled out its first Full MVNO on the Orange network in France. Recently it has worked with China Unicom at the Beijing Winter Olympics and has established a commercial agreement with Qatari MNO Ooredoo for the FIFA World Cup. Cellhire serves customers across multiple distribution channels including B2B, B2C, White Label, Partner and M2M/IoT wholesale airtimes from offices in the UK, Germany, France, Japan and the USA.
In recent years the business has invested in the development of Atlas, a proprietary Billing and SIM Management Platform as well as expanding its M2M, IoT and eSIM capabilities. This has underpinned strong growth with turnover increasing by 42% between 2019 and 2022, from £19.1 million to £27.1 million.
LDC is backing the existing management team, led by Chairman Tim Williams and Group CEO Martyn Stevens. The investment was led by Dan Smith, Partner and Head of Yorkshire at LDC, alongside Investment Director Will Scales and Investment Manager Ana-Maria Garaba.
