Irish fintech group Carne valued at €400m following investment

IRISH fintech Carne has been valued at around €400m following an investment by European private equity firm Vitruvian Partners.

Vitruvian has invested €100m in the company for about a quarter of the equity. Vitruvian will also hold two of the eight board seats in Carne, which is co-owned by its founder John Donohoe and and other senior managers in the firm.

Founded in 2004, Carne provides fund management solutions and says it is the largest third-party fund management company in the world.

Carne manages the governance, compliance, and regulatory requirements for more than 550 asset managers and institutional investors.

Its technology platform, Compliance Oversight Risk and Reporting (CORR), helps asset managers to deal with their compliance, risk and operational requirements with greater accuracy, efficiency and effectiveness through automated data acquisition, analysis, and real-time reporting, the company said.

Commenting on the investment, John Donohoe, founder and group CEO, said the funds would be used to help the Carne with its industry transformation.

“It’s about our client’s digital transformation, about gathering and harnessing the value of data that’s there all for better investor outcomes,” he said.

“In a practical sense we will be hiring lots of product people…loads of software engineers, data scientists, business analysts, all going in and getting deeper and deeper into our clients to develop more solutions on our digital platform.”

The company decided to look at bringing in an external investor last year, in a move that was client-led.

“Because we built this tech platform that is totally unlike anything in the market, they [the clients] have been asking us to develop it further, and provide more and more new solutions, and we talked to a number of them and said [that] to meet their demand the only constraint was financial,” Mr Donohoe said.

He added that the clients welcomed the idea of Carne bringing in a minority investor with the management team remaining in charge of the company.

Founded in Dublin, the business today employs more than 100 people in the capital. A further 120 staff are based in Kilkenny, with more than 20 in Wexford.

The remainder of its workforce are located across seven other countries.

In September, the company appointed John Herlihy, former head of Google Ireland, and now vice president and MD of LinkedIn for Europe Middle East Africa and Latin America, as its non-executive chairperson.