Promoting Process Excellence: SAP to Acquire Signavio

‍On January 27, 2021, SAP announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Signavio, a leading provider of business transformation solutions. Summit Partners invested in Signavio, backing CEO and Founder Gero Decker as the company’s first institutional investor.

As workforces become more distributed and companies more global – business processes have continued to proliferate and grow more complex. This complexity is further accented by an increasingly regulated operating landscape; from data privacy and cybersecurity, to reporting requirements and consumer protections, oversight and compliance considerations continue to grow. The name Signavio, comes from “segnavia,” the Italian word for signpost -- an appropriate name for a company that, from its earliest days, has sought to help guide businesses through the challenges of constant change and reinvention. As students at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, co-founders Gero Decker, Willi Tscheschner and Nicolas Peters understood that increasingly complex processes required a more collaborative, flexible and accessible approach to knowledge sharing between employees and across departments. They founded Signavio in 2009, launching the first cloud-native, collaborative business process management (BPM) software solution.

The Signavio team bootstrapped the company for several years, prioritizing capital efficient growth and capitalizing on meaningful market momentum. By 2015, the company had developed a global customer base, growing traction with large enterprise accounts, and a meaningful base of recurring revenues. We were fortunate to partner with CEO Gero Decker and a growing Signavio team in December 2015, as the company sought to expand its international footprint, continue its record of product innovation and further accelerate growth.

Over the course of our partnership, Signavio has expanded its geographic footprint to twelve international offices, growing staff from 75 to more than 450 employees worldwide. Today, Signavio serves over 1 million users at more than 2,000 organizations worldwide. With its innovative, intelligent and easy-to-use solutions, Signavio is helping to enable digital transformation across thousands of organizations worldwide, facilitating new use cases and extending the reach of BPM software from IT to business users. As businesses continue to navigate the global impact of COVID-19 – and learn to adapt and be agile to ensure business continuity, it is more important than ever for employees across an enterprise to remain collaborative in order to transform their businesses through the digitization and automation of their processes.

Today, we want to celebrate the vision and execution of Gero and the Signavio team – and to recognize the beginning of a new chapter on this growth journey. We are confident about the continued positive impact that Signavio’s solutions will have on its customers and the industry as a whole, and we look forward to following the company’s growth as part of the SAP platform.

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn

Since 1984, Summit Partners has invested in more than 500 companies in technology, healthcare, consumer, financial services and other growth sectors. An alphabetical list of Summit Partners' growth equity portfolio companies can be found here.‍

Founded in 1984, Summit Partners is a global alternative investment firm that is currently managing more than $23 billion in capital dedicated to growth equity, fixed income and public equity opportunities. Summit invests across growth sectors of the economy and has invested in more than 500 companies in healthcare & life sciences, technology and other growth industries. For more information, including a complete list of companies, visit www.summitpartners.com. SAP's acquisition of Signavio was announced on January 27, 2021, and the transaction is expected to close by Q2 2021, subject to approvals by antitrust authorities.