LiveChat announced the completion of a management buy-out from their previous investors, Naspers, a South African-based multinational media group. The management buy-out is backed by funding from Tar Heel Capital, giving the LiveChat founding team a 60% stake in the company.  The investor buyout is quite an unusual circumstance in business–it only happens when a company wants more equity control.

Tar Heel Capital is a Polish company that manages private equity funds, investing in companies to allow them to further develop, often leading to institutional investment or an IPO.  Though the company is based in Poland, they are still incorporated here in the United States.

LiveChat was founded in 2002, and since 2010 they have been cash flow positive.  Simply put, more money comes in than out, which is what every business wants.  LiveChat attributes its financial stability to its product and ongoing support from core customers.  Their unique chat invitation triggers, and visitor behavior monitoring services help businesses better service their customers, as well as improve their own service with the information gathered from visitors.

Aside from being available on the web, LiveChat is also available on mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows OS.  Back in July, they launched an app compatible for iPads, as well as Facebook-integrated.  This availability of LiveChat on mobile platforms as well as social networks is crucial, as there is a huge demand from the mobile sector.  This means there is also a huge demand for customer support here, and there’s a huge population that uses social media.

LiveChat eliminates the customer’s need to physically visit the company just to have their problem solved, or wait a long time on the phone to reach customer service.  Problems get fixed in real-time and everyone saves a lot of time, and of course money. The company claims it serves some 1600 businesses of all sizes, including Linens ‘N Things, ING, Adobe, Orange Telecom, Better Business Bureau, and Air Asia.

“With the backing of Naspers, we enjoyed significant growth and are in a strong position to take the business forward as an employee-owned company. We’re ramping up our goal to become the undisputed leader of support software for ecommerce and give every business the tools to communicate with website visitors,” said Mariusz Cieply, CEO of LiveChat.

LiveChat is one of the many technology-driven solutions for customer service today.  It’s a space that’s readily improved by big data solutions, empowering metrics for better customer management products, an area where ClickFox has found its niche as well. LiveChat took the top spot from Assistly, which was acquired by Salesforce.com for $50M in September of this year.