Ardian, a world leading private investment house, has significantly reinvested in Uptoo, a leading player specializing in recruitment, consulting and training of salespeople. The objective of this reinvestment is to support Uptoo’s growth and diversification of its activities. As part of this transaction, Uptoo’s managers will remain majority shareholders of the company.
The company, founded in 2005, aims to become the leading partner for supporting sales enablement of companies in France. Since Ardian Growth’s initial investment in 2019, Uptoo has largely outperformed the market, with growth exceeding expectations, and showing resilience throughout the Covid-19 crisis. The company has increased its turnover fourfold since 2015, which is now expected to exceed €30M this year. The company has more than doubled its workforce, from 110 employees in 2019 to 250 today. Uptoo has also developed a fully integrated and highly digitalized consulting and training offer over the past three years.
Uptoo now has more than 7,000 clients, including SMBs, start-ups and large enterprises (public companies). Uptoo helps them strengthen their sales organization through the recruitment and training of sales staff and the modernization of sales methods and tools, therefore significantly and rapidly improving their market positions.
“We are very proud to have supported Uptoo in its development over the last three years and are delighted to continue our collaboration with the company’s high quality management team as we pursue further growth. The sales enablement market has a significant growth potential and Uptoo is one of the best positioned to benefit from it. The quality of its teams, strategy, process and digital tools offers Uptoo’s clients a more than ever needed competitive advantage, indistinctively of their sector or profile.” Frederic Quéru, Managing Director within the Ardian Growth Team
“With Ardian’s support, our ambition is to become the market leader in France. Uptoo’s strong performance to-date demonstrated the growth potential in the sales enablement market, which has not yet been fully digitalised. Companies can unlock this growth by recruiting the best talents to boost sales, training and developing the skills of its sales teams over time, establishing or rethinking sales methods and tools, all while using the potential of digital. This new fundraising will give us the resources to continue to develop and to capitalize on our unique digital platform, which allows a real time connection between our consultants, clients and the best sales and management talents.” Didier Perraudin, Founder and CEO, Uptoo
LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
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Ardian Growth: Frédéric Quéru, Florian Dupont, Alexandra Da Silva
- Corporate advisor: Dentons (Pascal Chadenet, Caroline Pucel)
- Investor legal advisor: Orsan (David Sebban)
- Banking legal advisor: Hogan Lovells (Sabine Bironneau)
- Tax advisor: Mamou & Boccara (Laurent Mamou)
- Financial advisor: Crowe HAF (Thomas Corbineau, Julien Latrubesse, Thyl Bourgeois)
- Bank financing: LCL (Cécile Pénard, Romane Delaunay), Crédit Agricole IDF (Sandrine Piedelievre, Thomas Morais), Caisse d’Epargne IDF (Cédric Alin, Bouchra Chine, Antonin Boyé)
ABOUT UPTOO
Uptoo is the first platform for recruiting and training salespeople and sales managers throughout the country and in all sectors. The company intervenes with a strike force of consultants and digital tools to help companies secure and accelerate their recruitments. At the end of 2019, Uptoo began marketing its BtoB and BtoC training offer before developing its sales performance consulting offer the following year.
Good salespeople are rare and sales temperament is not something you can see on a resume. Uptoo has implemented modern assessment tools that reveal sales talents and lack of training. The Uptoo Digital platform allows to analyze in real time the commercial temperament of a candidate and recommend in real time a personalised training program thanks to a series of online tests and business consulting.
In a tense market where the war for growth is raging, Uptoo is deploying an important set of means to help their clients to make a difference in their market with recruitment and enablement projects providing high ROI.
Key figures :
• More than 2,500 recruitment missions/year
• Over 250 employees in Paris, Lyon, Nantes and Bordeaux
• More than 400,000 candidates are members of UptooJobs
• More than 7,000 customers
ABOUT ARDIAN
Ardian is a world leading private investment house, managing or advising $141bn of assets on behalf of more than 1,300 clients globally. Our broad expertise, spanning Private Equity, Real Assets and Credit, enables us to offer a wide range of investment opportunities and respond flexibly to our clients’ differing needs. Through Ardian Customized Solutions we create bespoke portfolios that allow institutional clients to specify the precise mix of assets they require and to gain access to funds managed by leading third-party sponsors. We also provide a specialist service for private clients through Ardian Private Wealth Solutions. Ardian is majority-owned by its employees and places great emphasis on developing its people and fostering a collaborative culture based on collective intelligence. Our 900+ employees, spread across 15 offices in Europe, the Americas and Asia, are strongly committed to the principles of Responsible Investment and are determined to make finance a force for good in society. Our goal is to deliver excellent investment performance combined with high ethical standards and social responsibility.
At Ardian we invest all of ourselves in building companies that last.
