Guyanese Jonathan Brassington has sold his company, LiquidHub, one of the Philadelphia area’s information technology success stories in recent years, to a France-based consulting giant. The entrepreneur is the brother of Winston Brassington
LiquidHub CEO Jonathan Brassington
Capgemini, a US$15.6 billion (yearly sales) Paris-based professional-services and consulting firm, said on Monday it has purchased LiquidHub, the US$250 million (yearly sales) “digital-customer engagement” IT and business-staffing and consulting firm based in Wayne. LiquidHub, which has 2000-plus employees, counts GlaxoSmithKline, Independence Blue Cross, Merck, Subaru, Vanguard, and other big employers as clients.
Capgemini officials said they paid around “two times revenues” or about US$500 million. In a statement, Capgemini, which competes with Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, and other US- and India-based firms for global IT clients, said it bought LiquidHub to acquire its “seasoned design thinkers, user-experience designers, digital architects, and analytics specialists” who “will join Capgemini’s digital teams to create, for its clients, [digital] experiences that help to attract, acquire and retain customers”.
Pennsylvania taxpayers helped LiquidHub thrive in its early years: “In 2004, LiquidHub received US$100,000 through (the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development’s) Opportunity Grant Program and US$100,000 for job training through the Customised Job Training Program,” state spokesman Michael Gerber confirms.
In exchange, LiquidHub promised to “create 83 jobs” in the state and retain 90 more, and to invest US$730,000. Then in 2010 – three years after CreditSuisse’s US$20 million investment — LiquidHub received another US$100,000 State Opportunity Grant, plus “US$312,000 in Job Creation Tax Credits for an expansion of its Tredyffrin Township facility”, in exchange for creating 104 new jobs and keeping what were by then 202 existing jobs, while also investing at least US$508,000. LiquidHub “exceeded all of these obligations”, Gerber concluded.
LiquidHub owners who presumably will be enriched by the sale include founders Rob Kelley, Lee Yohannan, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Brassington, three alumni of Philadelphia’s former Broadreach Consulting who started LiquidHub in 2000, and investor ChrysCapital, based in the Indian Ocean island nation and financial hub of Mauritius. CreditSuisse had led investors in raising US$20 million for the company back in 2007.
ChrysCapital invested US$53 million in LiquidHub in 2015 and promised to back acquisitions worth more than US$100 million. LiquidHub later bought digital designers Foundry9 of New York and Harold Hambrose’s ElectronicInk of Philadelphia, Salesforce.com client service firms HarvestSolutions of Boston and San Francisco, and ClosedWon of Albuquerque, New Mexico. LiquidHub also bought Annik Technology Services of Bellevue, Washington, and Redkite LLC of New York, speeding the company’s rapid growth in the last three years.
The deal will help sell LiquidHub’s consulting, design, and staffing services — targeting drug, financial, health insurance, and other industry solutions — to Capgemini customers, using the buyer’s “global reach” to “augment and expand our offerings”, Brassington said in a statement.
Brassington moved to Pennsylvania to study maths and computer science at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania, at the urging of his aunt, a Catholic nun. He later added a master’s from the University of Pennsylvania engineering school, where he is a member of the board of overseers, and has taken an active role in educational and tech promotion groups in the region.
Capgemini has offices in dozens of US cities, including the Philadelphia suburb of Horsham. Capgemini has lately purchased a string of companies with North American operations that help build “compelling customer experiences” for corporate clients and their customers, including design strategy and consulting firms Idean (2017) and Fahrenheit 212 (2016). Both of those companies now operate as part of Capgemini, and each has offices in New York, San Francisco, and other US cities.
LiquidHub was “a natural fit”, Capgemini Chairman and CEO Paul Hermelin said in the company’s statement. He praised LiquidHub’s “customer-centric mind-set” — and its “impressive employee retention” in an industry where staff more often is highly mobile, reflecting what is often a project-oriented focus.
Capgemini said it expected to finish the purchase in “the next couple of months.” (The Inquirer)
