Houlihan Lokey Advises The Rainmaker Group

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that The Rainmaker Group, a portfolio company of Norwest Venture Partners, has been acquired by Cendyn, a portfolio company of Accel-KKR. The transaction closed on July 30, 2019.

Rainmaker is a leading provider of hotel revenue and profit optimization cloud software solutions. The company partners with hotels, resorts, and casinos globally to help them outperform their revenue and profit objectives. Rainmaker’s cloud-based solutions for transient and group pricing optimization, forecasting, and revenue-centric business intelligence are designed to help hoteliers streamline operations, enhance revenue optimization processes, improve lead performance, and drive guest bookings. Recognized as one of the top privately-held companies in the United States, Rainmaker has been named to Inc. 5000’s Fastest Growing Privately-Held Companies for the last seven years and to the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s list of 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Atlanta. Rainmaker serves hospitality customers throughout the world from its corporate headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, and from offices in Las Vegas, Singapore, and Dubai.

Cendyn is a cloud-based software and services provider that develops integrated technology platforms for driving sales and marketing performance in the travel and hospitality industry. The Cendyn Hospitality Cloud offers the most complete set of innovative software and services in the industry, covering hotel marketing, guest engagement, and group sales. With offices in Boca Raton, Atlanta, Boston, San Diego, London, Munich, Singapore, Sydney, Bangkok, and Tokyo, Cendyn proudly serves clients in 143 countries, sending more than 1.5 billion personalized communications on behalf of their customers every year. 

The acquisition of Rainmaker's integrated solutions will enable Cendyn to drive performance across all aspects of the hotel business. Aligning operations, marketing, sales, and revenue will provide hoteliers with the means to optimize their strategies and drive performance and loyalty across their businesses.

Houlihan Lokey served as the exclusive financial advisor to Rainmaker and Norwest Venture Partners, and assisted in structuring and negotiating the transaction on its behalf. This transaction marks Houlihan Lokey's third successful travel technology transaction in the past 12 months, including the sale of Pegasus to TravelTripper, and the recapitalization of getaroom.com by Court Square Capital. Our travel tech advisory team has completed more than 25 transactions in the sector across B2C OTAs/marketplaces, B2B2C booking engines, and B2B software business models.