San Francisco, CA - July 22, 2016 — Serent Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm focused on investing in fast-growing technology and service businesses, announced that its portfolio company Knowland has acquired Meeting Intelligence (formerly known as HIS), incorporating both the product and employees, from Amadeus.
This acquisition enables Knowland to offer the most robust platform for meeting market intelligence to the hospitality industry. The addition of Amadeus’ database of meeting activity will improve Knowland’s existing data on groups and meetings to provide the most comprehensive database of group and meeting information in the hospitality industry. “By combining our extensive data, Knowland will be able to increase the effectiveness of its offerings as we continue to build our next generation of products,” said Tim Hart, CEO of Knowland.
“We’re excited to join Knowland to bring leading-edge solutions to our combined customer base,” commented Steve Reiser, the founder of HIS and now Knowland’s Chief Product Officer upon closing of the transaction. “We’ve both strived to provide our customers with high quality products and services, and now together, we can focus on advancing state-of-art meeting intelligence.”
In a separate agreement, Amadeus will also partner with Knowland to enable Amadeus’ sales and event management solution (Delphi) customers to tap into the most extensive groups and meetings intelligence available to enhance their group business. ”We are very happy to continue working with Knowland to integrate its extensive database of group and meeting intelligence into Amadeus solutions,” said Lee Horgan, CEO of Amadeus Hospitality. “Our Amadeus sales and event management customers will benefit from having a richer database of meeting intelligence that will allow them to get a better understanding of their group business.”
“The combination of Knowland and Meeting Intelligence is transformational,” said Serent Partner Lance Fenton. “We believe the scale from combining these two organizations creates a true market leader that can continue to innovate and deliver best-in-breed solutions to its customers.”
About Knowland
Knowland Group provides technology, data and analytics to the hospitality industry. Knowland's cloud-based sales and catering solution and its competitive intelligence tools help hotels to maximize revenue from meeting and conference space. Knowland's technology is powered by an extensive database of events, of organizations that hold these events, and of the key contacts who book them.
About Serent Capital
Serent Capital invests in growing businesses that it believes have developed compelling solutions that address their customers' needs. As those businesses grow and evolve, the opportunities and challenges that they face change with them. Principals at Serent Capital have firsthand experience at capturing those opportunities and navigating these difficulties through their experiences as CEOs, strategic advisors and board members to growing businesses. By bringing its expertise and capital to bear, Serent strives to help growing businesses thrive. For more information on Serent Capital, visit www.serentcapital.com.
