The Chicago private equity firm that acquired Vocus and Cision this year has confirmed industry expectations and said it will combine the two PR and marketing software providers under former Cision CEO Peter Granat.
GTCR, through its GTCR Canyon Holdings affiliate, acquired Vocus in January in a $446.5M deal and last month closed a tender offer that won control of Cision.
“The public relations and marketing industry is experiencing a fundamental transformation,” said Mark Anderson, GTCR managing director, who believes the combination will leverage each company's strengths across a combined customer base.
Plans for the combination of Sweden-based Cision, which has a North American base in Chicago, and Lanham, Md.-based Vocus have not yet been revealed.
Granat, who helped pivot Cision to a digital platform and divest legacy businesses over the past few years, stepped down from the Cision CEO post on Monday.
Cision said it had 963 employees through the first quarter of 2014, during which it posted revenue of around $31.6M.
Vocus had fourth quarter 2013 revenue of $47.5M on 16,800 subscription clients. Its average subscription price was around $7K last year and the company hoped to push that to $10K this year as it moved away from a small-business base.
Neither company was profitable last year as Vocus saw a net loss of $21.8M and Cision had net loss of 315M Swedish krona, about $41M, mostly on the offload of its print monitoring business in the US.
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