LONDON: Next 15 Communications Group plc has announced it has acquired Mach49, the Silicon Valley-based growth incubator for global businesses.
Signaling an important strategic move for Next 15, Mach49 will become the cornerstone of its previously announced plans to create a $100m revenue innovation business to work alongside Next 15’s market leading data, technology and brand marketing businesses to help global leaders create and execute disruptive growth strategies, shake up existing markets and open new ones.
Mach49 which has annual revenues of approximately $13m, currently has offices in Silicon Valley, Boston, London and Singapore serving Global 1000 clients such as Schneider Electric, Pernod Ricard, TDK, Stanley Black and Decker and many others.
Tim Dyson, CEO of Next 15 said: “The acquisition of Mach49 takes Next 15 in a new strategic direction. There is tremendous pressure within large businesses to innovate and transform to meet the world’s challenges, as well as to fight market disruption from VC-backed start-ups. In the current climate, we are seeing a big shift with large companies increasingly focused on the execution of these initiatives to drive meaningful growth.
Combining Next15’s experience with high growth Silicon-Valley companies and Mach49’s expertise in creating and launching new ventures, incubators and corporate venture capital funds will give us a unique service offering for global businesses to build and scale resilient new ventures. Collectively we can now work with customers to design and build high growth, Silicon Valley style companies with digital native go-to-market capabilities at their core.”
Led by a group of experienced and successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and C-Suite executives, Mach49 has pioneered a repeatable, scalable, customer-centric approach that enables global businesses to leverage the strength of their talent, assets, competencies, brands, channels and customers to build their own incubators and growth engines.
This approach, developed and codified over many years, has resulted in a consistently high success rate getting clients’ ventures to market, a performance that places them as one of the leading venture builders in the world.
Linda Yates, Founder and CEO of Mach49 said: “We see ourselves as co-founders not consultants, helping our clients unleash their inherent strengths to build their growth engines. We have invested many years building the methodology, processes and tools that are now driving our clients’ new venture building and investing success rate, Next15 emerged as the perfect partner — an agile, long-term disruptor themselves, many of Next 15’s companies provide execution capability our clients and their new ventures require. Combining forces with Next 15 will let us deliver a greatly expanded execution playbook so that our customers can more rapidly build and accelerate not just one new venture but a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures to drive meaningful growth.”
Mach49’s venture building practice has helped clients across a wide variety of industries such as Clipsal Solar, an Australian residential solar energy provider (incubated with Schneider Electric); Surehand, a self-service hiring platform that instantly matches industrial employers with skilled tradespeople (incubated with Stanley Black & Decker) and Pear.ai, an energy analytics solution for enterprises (incubated with RWE and recently acquired by Exelon).
Mach49’s global corporate venture investing practice (CVC) has helped build and manage top tier CVCs including TDK Ventures, Pernod Ricard’s Convivialité Ventures, Goodyear Ventures, Qu Ventures, and Hypertherm Ventures, among many others. These clients are leveraging Silicon Valley best practices — taking advantage of the many decades of experience represented by the Mach49 VCs-in-Residence who coach and guide them. Mach49 has partnered with the top professors of corporate innovation and growth from universities such as Stanford, Dartmouth, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Columbia and Northwestern.
Mach49’s game-changing approach to venture building and incubating growth will soon be chronicled in Founder and CEO, Linda Yates’ book “Disrupting InsideOut: How Companies Can Launch New Ventures at Startup Speed to Drive Growth,” to be published by Harvard Press, Spring 2021.
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