TECHIE
PAYMENTS PEOPLE A look at some of the new generation of Nashville-based processors and business software aggregators
i3 Verticals This is getting to be old hat for Greg Daily. Seven years after launching i3, the payment processing veteran has the company listed on the Nasdaq, worth more than $600 million and with plenty of financial ammo to continue an acquisition spree. The story sounds a lot like the trajectory Daily took with PMT Services two decades ago and iPayment in the 2000s, but i3 is bringing a little bit of a twist to the model: The company is building out an array of proprietary software services — focused primarily on the education, property management and government agency sectors — that facilitate traditional payments. That group pales in sales relative to pure merchant services, but it drops a much higher percentage of its revenues to the bottom line.
Sphere
Celero Commerce
Waud Capital Partners, which in 2005 founded Acadia Healthcare and later joined forces with the team led by Joey Jacobs to grow that behavioral health care venture, formed Sphere in early 2017 with Nashville native Andrew Rueff, who last decade co-founded TransFirst Holdings — which TSYS bought in 2016 for more than $2 billion — and was looking for his next project. Sphere soon snapped up Texas-based TrustCommerce and merchant acquirer Anoxia Payments to build its base and this spring invested in Qgiv, a Florida company specializing in online fundraising for nonprofits. In addition to its Nashville home office, Sphere runs a tech center on the West Coast, an operations hub at Anovia’s former HQ in Dallas and an executive office near New York City.
Sphere’s deal for Anovia produced another Nashville-based startup looking to roll up parts of the payments and business software space. Last last year, Philadelphia-based LLR Partners said it was backing Kevin Jones, who co-founded Anovia in 2013, to build Celero on the back of a stake in merchant acquirer UMS Banking. Jones is aiming to build an “integrated commerce solutions provider” that pairs processing with other software and data intelligence services to give small and mid-sized businesses an analytics edge in understanding their customers. Early this year, Jones’ team bought a Minneapolis company that specializes in apps used in HVAC repair, home security systems and other field service sectors.
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