The enterprise-focused software-as-a-service company Visma AS has been valued at 19 billion euros (about $21 billion) after bringing in fresh capital from new and existing investors to help fund its international expansion.

Reuters reported that about 20 new investors, including Altaroc, Jane Street and NYV Retirement System, are injecting more than 1 billion euros into the company as part of an equity investment deal. Visma’s existing investors, including its majority shareholder HgCapital LLP, plus TPG and Visma Management, are adding an additional 3 billion euros, the report added.

Norway-based Visma is a SaaS company with more than 11,000 employees that sells accounting, payroll and human resource software products to customers across the Baltic, Benelux and Nordic regions. Its cloud-based applications also handle key business tasks such as supply chain management. The privately-owned company reportedly generated more than 2 billion euros in sales in 2022, growing 17% from the prior year.

Hg Senior Partner Nic Humphries said Visma is now the largest private equity-owned software company in Europe, growing twice as fast as it was when the firm first invested in it in 2006. That’s despite that the business is now 20 times larger, he added.

As part of the deal, Hg will remain the majority shareholder in Visma. It said it sold part of its stake from one of its older funds, while reinvesting in the company through a newer fund.

Visma was previously said to be in discussions with a number of unnamed sovereign wealth funds based in Asia and the Middle East over a potential funding round. However, it’s not clear if any of those funds were part of the investment announced today.

Enterprise resource planning software companies have attracted a lot of interest from private equity firms this year. In May, Silver Lake Partners made a 600 million euro investment in the Italian company TeamSystem S.p.A.

Visma has also been making investments of its own this year. Last month it announced plans to Danish legal software company ivision, several months after it swooped to buy Recrea Systems SLU, parent company of the tax compliance software provider Quaderno.

Visma was previously valued at $19 billion following a secondary share sale in September 2021. At the time, Visma said it was considering going public through an initial public offering that was slated for this year. However, the company warned at the time it would only do so if market conditions were favorable, and with the subsequent decline of the global economy, it’s no surprise that such a move never materialized.

In a statement today, Visma Chief Executive Merete Hverven avoided any talk of an IPO this time around, saying today’s investment leaves the company “perfectly positioned” to continue its unique growth journey.

Image: Visma AS