New Havenbased SeeClickFix sold

NEW HAVEN — SeeClickFix, one of the city’s leading technology companies, has been acquired by Kansasbased CivicPlus.

Financial terms of the deal, which was announced late Friday, were not released. Ben Berkowitz, chief executive officer of SeekClickFix, said the company, which has 32 employees, will remain in New Haven.

The company’s mobile and Web application allows people all across the country to report issues and concerns directly to the appropriate municipal or county government departments. New Haven,Trumbull and Bridgeport are among SeeClickFix’s clients in Connecticut

With the acquisition of SeeClickFix, CivicPlus has 3,750 government entities as clients, said Cole Cheever, vice president of the acquiring company, which is based in Manhattan, Kansas.

Ward Morgan, founder and majority owner of CivicPlus, said his company and SeeClickFix are a good fit because they have similar corporate cultures.

“In SeeClickFix, we see a likeminded partner that is equally committed to helping people and governments build more transparent, collaborative, and engaged communities,” Morgan said in a written statement. “Together, we can only become stronger, more efficient, and better equipped for delivering innovative technology to the public sector.”

This is the fifth deal for CivicPlus since January 2017. While four of the deals were outright acquisitions, CivicPlus last week announced a partnership with a Canadian company, Civil Space.

Cheever said the ability to make so many deals in such a short time frame was made possible by “the size of the companies being acquired.”

“A lot of these were small acquisition made up of small (corporate) teams,” he said. The SeeClickFix acquisition is CivicPlus’ largest to date, according to Cheever.

CivicPlus may have hit a bump in the road earlier this year when the city of Dayton, Ohio, saw its web site go down twice in an 11month period. City officials weren’t immediately available for comment Monday.

Berkowitz said Monday that SeeClickFix has been a potential acquisition target for some time now, adding he rejected a recent offer for the company because its corporate culture wasn’t the right fit.

“We laid out what we wanted and all along, we hoped that CivicPlus would get involved,” Berkowitz said. “They have a good reputation, which is important to us.”

CivicPlus had 320 employees prior to the deal, which makes its workforce 10 times the size of SeeClickFix’s workforce. Berkowitz said the company, which is located at 770 Chapel St., is in the midst of hiring six people.

CivicPlus got its start at the end of the 1990s Cheever said.

The acquisition of SeeClickFix expands the CivicPlus in New England, Cheever said. CivicPlus has 25 people working in Boxborough, Mass., who are responsible for handling clients of the company that are smaller municipal and county governments.

Berkowitz said the deal moves SeeClickFix closer to what he has long envisioned for the company.

“I really want SeeClickFix to become ubiquitous,” Berkowitz said.

Garrett Sheehan, president and chief executive officer of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, said the acquisition of SeeClickFix speaks well of New Haven’s importance as a center of innovation.

“It would be different if nobody were interested in the companies founded here,” Sheehan said. “The more we get our name out there, the better is for our reputation (as a regional center of innovation).”

Derek Slap, a Democratic state senator from West Hartford and chief executive officer of the Connecticut Technology Council, said while the state and the New Haven area “are punching above our weight class” in terms of helping technology startups succeed, more need to be done to help midsized companies grow.

“We’ve expanded the rules governing angel investors,” Slap said. “But we need to do more.”

Angel investors are wealthy individuals who provide capital for business startups, often for an ownership stake in the company.

A less parochial focus on where technology businesses expand would also be helpful to the state in the long run, according to Slap.

“We don’t really have one city that’s a big economic engine,” he said.