Houlihan Lokey Advises Questionmark

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that Questionmark, a portfolio company of FPE Capital (FPE), has been acquired by Learnosity, a portfolio company of Battery Ventures. The transaction closed on 9 June 2021.

Questionmark’s SaaS solutions provide global end-to-end assessments, proctoring, badging, and reporting to over 600 customers in the corporate, government, academic, and certification sectors. Customers are spread globally with the three largest single end markets being the US (38%), Germany (26%), and the UK (15%). Working from a strong base within the corporate and government learning and compliance market, Questionmark has diversified into certification and proctoring and is an emerging disruptor in the large and growing market with strong digital tailwinds.

FPE Capital, a specialist growth investor in enterprise software and services companies, invested in Questionmark in 2016 and, through heavy investment into product and sales capability, transformed its growth profile in the exciting and growing assessment market. FPE’s significant growth capital funded an expansion of the company’s management team and completed a complex technology migration to a single SaaS software platform. Working alongside the founders, FPE recruited a new CEO, Lars Pedersen, to lead the growth of the business once the technology migration was completed, and this has helped the business grow strongly in the past two years, with annual revenue growth at the end of 2020 running at 35%.

Learnosity provides the assessment infrastructure powering more than 120 of the world’s leading learning platforms and publishers. Serving 39.3 million learners across the K-12, higher ed, vocational learning, and corporate training markets, Learnosity’s suite of cloud-based APIs enable cutting-edge
assessments, faster time-to-market, and lower development costs. Learnosity is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland with a significant R&D team in Sydney, Australia, and a US office in New York.

Houlihan Lokey served as the exclusive M&A advisor to FPE Capital and Questionmark and assisted in initiating, structuring, and negotiating the transaction on their behalf. This transaction further enhances Houlihan Lokey’s Data & Analytics and Technology, Media & Telecom (TMT) groups’ track record in HCM and learning software businesses.

Other Houlihan Lokey transactions in the HCM, assessment, and online learning sector include acting for ECI Partners on the acquisition of CIPHR; itslearning on its sale to Sanoma Group; Skillsoft on its Chapter 11 restructuring and subsequent sale to Churchill Capital Corp. II; Cambridge University on its acquisition of the University of Durham’s Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring; Kallidus on its sale to Apse Capital; Alchemy on its sale to Intertek Group; Select International on its sale to PSI Services; and AIR Assessment on its sale to Cambium Learning Group, Inc.