Cube Infrastructure Managers, investing on behalf of its latest core European fund, has acquired a data centre business in Germany from EMERAM Capital Partners.
The mid-market infrastructure investor’s Cube Infrastructure Fund III fund is investing an undisclosed amount to buy Frankfurt-based Firstcolo Datacenters from funds advised by EMERAM and its portfolio company Diva-e Excellence.
The two founders of Firstcolo – Jerome Evans and Nicolaj Kamensek – will remain shareholders of Firstcolo and will continue to lead the company in the next growth phase.
Firstcolo, founded in 2007, owns two Tier III-plus data centres in Frankfurt and provides colocation, dedicated servers, managed services and private cloud solutions. The business expanded through the acquisition of Accelerated IT in 2017.
Stéphane Calas, partner at Cube Infrastructure Managers, said: “We believe Firstcolo to be very well positioned to address the increasing needs of German SMEs in terms of colocation and cloud services, with the ability to anticipate the future needs of customers.
“Our team is very excited to join forces with Jerome and Nicolaj, Firstcolo’s management team and founders to write the next growth chapter of the Company.”
Alexis Tran-Viet, partner at EMERAM Capital Partners, said: “We are proud to have supported Firstcolo to become one of the leading and most efficient data centre players in the Frankfurt region with a differentiated and customer-centric value proposition.
“It has been a pleasure to partner with Jerome Evans and Nicolaj Kamensek who have done a fantastic job in executing the joint value creation plan which we foresaw at the time of the original acquisitions.”
Jerome Evans, CEO at Firstcolo, said: “Over the past five years, we more than doubled our revenue and assets and expanded into new areas such as private cloud.
“With Cube, we have gained a long-term oriented owner who will support us with our ambition to expand the platform and triple in size.
“Our goal is to build more data centres in the future that have industry-leading PUE values in terms of energy efficiency. Together, we will continue our journey of growth and digitalisation.”
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