The transaction is to be financed by the Cube Infrastructure Fund III, which had its first close in September 2021, reaching €1 billion. Cube is acquiring firstcolo from funds advised by EMERAM Capital Partners (EMERAM) and its portfolio company diva-e Excellence GmbH (diva-e).
"We believe firstcolo to be very well positioned to address the increasing needs of German SMEs in terms of colocation and cloud services, with the ability to anticipate the future needs of customers," said Stéphane Calas, partner at Cube Infrastructure Managers.
"Our team is very excited to join forces with Jerome and Nicolaj, firstcolo’s management team and founders to write the next growth chapter of the company.”
The firstcolo portfolio is comprised of two Tier III+ data centres in Frankfurt both of which are powered by 100% green electricity. Since its launch in 2007 the company has gone onto acquire Accelerated IT in 2017.
Once EMERAM and diva-e joined as majority shareholders, firstcolo’s saw its revenues and profitability around its core colocation offering grow, bolstered by its entry into new high growth areas such as private cloud solutions.
“We are proud to have supported firstcolo to become one of the leading and most efficient data centre players in the Frankfurt region with a differentiated and customer-centric value proposition," added Dr. Alexis Tran-Viet, partner at EMERAM.
"It has been a pleasure to partner with Jerome Evans and Nicolaj Kamensek who have done a fantastic job in executing the joint value creation plan which we foresaw at the time of the original acquisitions.”
Founders Jerome Evans and Nicolaj Kamensek will remain shareholders of firstcolo, continuing to lead the company in the next growth phase.
No closing date has been shared and the deal is still subject to customary closing conditions.
"With Cube, we have gained a long-term oriented owner who will support us with our ambition to expand the platform and to triple in size," commented Evans.
"Our goal is to build more data centres in the future that have industry-leading PUE values in terms of energy efficiency. Together, we will continue our journey of growth and digitalisation.”
