Holland Mountain accelerates US expansion with acquisition

With additional reporting by Graham Bippart

Holland Mountain announced that it has acquired PE Stack, a US-based consulting and research company for GPs and LPs. The deal gives the London-based service provider a formal entry point into the US market, while complementing its consulting services.

By adding PE Stack, Holland Mountain said it’s getting a database of market intelligence providers and private capital software. This offering, in turn, gives LPs and GPs the ability to search through a wide selection of vendors.

Among the services it provides is the proprietary Vendor Maps, according to Holland Mountain CEO Barnaby Piggott. “For example, CRM can mean many things, and PE Stack’s Vendor Maps allow firms to pull various functions and services out so a manager can see exactly what each vendor provides and whether it’s a good fit for their needs,” he told Private Funds CFO on the sidelines of the CFOs & COOs Forum Europe in London on Tuesday. It also allows firms to break vendors down by a host of other categories, including, for example, geography.

PE Stack’s website lists vendors ranging from Broadridge on the portfolio monitoring side to Citco on the LP portal/VDR side.

The deal adds three Los Angeles-based PE Stack staffers to Holland Mountain’s employee base, and once the service is fully integrated, the firm plans to further expand its presence in the US. “This is just the beginning of our expansion plan,” Piggott said.

Holland Mountain, which owns the ATLAS Data Platform, already offers private capital industry players advanced data analytics, data warehousing and system integration. PE Stack’s database will complement those services, Piggott added.

PE Stack founder Tim Friedman noted in a press release how the deal could help with its product pipeline.

“With additional resources available to us, we anticipate significant enhancement to our ongoing product research process,” he stated. “We will continue to work proactively with the vendor community to ensure their solutions are represented accurately to both our clients and the wider private capital community via our public Vendor Profiles database.”

Separate from the maps, Vendor Profiles categorizes and profiles various service providers.

Holland Mountain did not disclose the terms of its acquisition.