London, November 6, 2024 – Kaizen, a leading provider of regulatory compliance solutions for global financial institutions, today announced the completion of a £42 million minority investment from Guidepost Growth Equity, a Boston-based growth equity firm partnering with entrepreneur-led technology companies. The investment will be used to accelerate product development, invest in go-to-market initiatives, expand in North America, and enhance its award-winning compliance technology. This represents Kaizen’s first external investment since its founding in 2013 by CEO Dario Crispini.
Kaizen is the global leader in regulatory reporting quality assurance with its pioneering ReportShield platform, which enables its clients to fully test the accuracy and quality of regulatory reports at the trade level, identify 100% of errors at scale, and efficiently remediate with global regulatory coverage including MiFID, EMIR, SFTR, CFTC, and SEC, among others.
Kaizen has established itself as a trusted partner to the world’s largest and most sophisticated banks, asset managers, hedge funds and brokers to ensure accurate, complete, and timely reporting in an increasingly challenging regulatory environment, evidenced by strong revenue growth since inception.
More recently, the Company has diversified its product suite to include solutions for managing and reporting shareholding disclosures, regulatory rules management, trade and communications surveillance and research management. Kaizen has also invested in London Reporting House and Cumulus9.
Dario Crispini, Founder and CEO, Kaizen commented: “We are delighted to be partnering with Guidepost as we enter a new chapter in our evolution. Guidepost has a great track record in helping firms reach their full potential and their investment and partnership will enable us to build and enhance our existing technology, deliver new compliance solutions, and drive our expansion into North America. The solutions we offer at Kaizen are designed to help our clients adhere to their compliance obligations in an efficient and cost-effective manner and we look forward to delivering more solutions that do just that.”
Gene Nogi, General Partner at Guidepost said: “Kaizen has transformed the transaction reporting and compliance market, helping the world’s largest financial institutions navigate and comply with an increasingly complex regulatory environment with heightened scrutiny from regulators. The Company embodies everything we look for in an entrepreneur-led, capital-efficient, rapidly growing, and highly differentiated technology business operating within a large, dynamic market. We are thrilled to partner with Dario, Ian and the entire team at Kaizen and look forward to working together on the next stage of the journey.”
As part of the investment, Gene Nogi will join the Kaizen Board of Directors alongside two new independent directors to be named. Raymond James was the exclusive financial advisor on the investment and Norton Rose Fulbright acted as legal counsel to Kaizen. Liberty Corporate Finance, Alvarez and Marsal and Crosslake also advised Kaizen. Choate Hall & Stewart and Stevens & Bolton acted as legal counsel to Guidepost.
About Guidepost Growth Equity
Guidepost Growth Equity (“Guidepost”) is a leading core growth equity firm that partners with entrepreneur-led companies utilizing technology to transform industries within application and infrastructure software and tech-enabled and data services. Current and prior investments include ActiveViam (acquired by Nordic Capital), ClassWallet, Lucid (acquired by Cint Group AB), Mineral (acquired by Mitratech), OutSystems, Traction on Demand (acquired by Salesforce), and Tractive. The firm is headquartered in Boston, MA.
Guidepost Growth Equity provides the flexible capital, operational assistance, and strategic guidance necessary to support the continued success of high-growth businesses and has over $1.9 billion of capital under management. For more information, please visit their website.
For more information, please contact James Dunseath, Communications Advisor, on +44 (0) 7557 955795 or media@kaizenreporting.com
