Macquarie leads $99m round for Australia IT provider Orro

The investment is primarily debt, although Macquarie is taking a small equity stake, according to an article by The Australian Finance Review re-posted by Liverpool on social media. Liverpool did not exit as part of the transaction.

“As a PE firm, you can’t truthfully say something isn’t for sale, but one thing you’re always doing is evaluating what the right window [of timing for a sale] is,” Jonathan Lim, a managing partner at Liverpool, was quoted as saying.

“Where we got to is we could absolutely have got a great return, but it wasn’t the optimal window [for a sale], given how much value there was still to be created in the Orro business.”

Orro was set up by Liverpool and Parc along with Damian Higgins, founder of cloud provider CustomTec, as a holding company called Cirrus in 2019. It rebranded as Orro in 2021. Parc has made three follow-on investments.

Orro specialises in cloud and managed IT services, as well as networking and security services aimed at delivering businesses greater agility and improved performance. This includes areas such as digital team collaboration tools and cybersecurity consulting.

Clients include Qantas, The Salvation Army, Healthscope, and Michelin Group-owned heavy manufacturing company Fenner Conveyers.

The largest customer is Australia Post, for which Orro has helped outfit 4,000 nationwide locations with high-speed internet and intelligent network management services. This is said to have reduced some of Australia Post’s operating costs by 40%.

Macquarie Capital is the corporate advisory, capital markets, and principal investment arm of Macquarie Group. It has identified digital infrastructure – including cloud and artificial intelligence systems in addition to hard assets – as a core investment area.

“It’s only in the last five years that we’ve seen cloud computing become mainstream and it has already transformed the front office functions – such as sales, invoicing, payments and even customer service – of most businesses, even the smallest ones,” Edward Burley, Macquarie Capital’s head of digital networks and data, said in a statement last September.

“We’re only about 20% of the way there. Eighty percent of government and enterprise processes still need to be migrated. When this happens, it will create so much more data that needs to be transmitted, captured and stored.”

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Support services
• Technology
• Expansion
• Australia
• Macquarie Group
• Liverpool Partners
• cloud computing
• enterprise software