Select Case Studies
Partnering with leading real estate payments technology platform to accelerate growth
Sector: Payments Technology
Investment Type: Structured Growth Equity
Status: Exited
Website: www.clickpay.com
“We received a high degree of interest from numerous strategic and financial parties, we ultimately selected Thayer Street Partners… [Thayer Street] has consistently leveraged its unique network within the real estate and real estate services community and its general small business back-office software expertise to support ClickPay”
– Steven Van Praagh, ClickPay President and COO
Company Overview
ClickPay provides the leading real estate payments platform for multifamily property managers and landlords to bill and collect payments online.
The Company streamlines electronic and paper payment methods on one dashboard for safe, remote payments with no burden on office staff and aims to drive efficiencies, accelerate cash flow, and simplify reconciliations for multifamily property managers and landlords. Integrated with accounting systems and partnered with leading banks, ClickPay has achieved the highest electronic adoption in the industry.
Thayer Street Value Creation
Through its extensive networks in its target sectors, such as payments and real estate services, Thayer Street identified ClickPay relatively early in its lifecycle and was one of its earliest institutional investors. Since its first investment in 2011 through exit in 2018, Thayer Street executed a series of creative follow-on investments, designed to address the needs of both Company management and existing shareholders, and ultimately Thayer Street became the Company’s largest shareholder.
Working closely with ClickPlay management, Thayer Street:
- leveraged its network within the real estate management community to make valuable new customer introductions that resulted in significant revenue growth, ultimately creating 10 of ClickPay’s 25 largest customer relationships;
- assisted the Company in managing many of the complexities of payment regulation, such as tenant-landlord compliance.
The Results
ClickPay grew annualized revenue more than 5x from 2014 to 2017.
In 2018, ClickPay was acquired by RealPage, a global provider of software and data analytics to the real estate industry, for $219m.
The portfolio companies presented are not intended to be a representative sample of all portfolio companies that Thayer Street has worked with or invested in. The statement quoted above was made by the former President of ClickPay, Steven Van Praagh. Mr. Van Praagh has not received compensation for the above statement and this statement is solely his opinion and representative of his experience with Thayer Street. Other portfolio company executives may not necessarily share the same view. It should not be assumed and there is no guarantee that Thayer Street’s investment in the referenced portfolio company or other portfolio companies has been or will ultimately be profitable.