ACL Secures $50 Million Investment from Norwest

ACL has announced the company has received a $50 million strategic minority investment led by the growth equity team at Norwest.

The Vancouver-based ACL is a SaaS provider that works with some of the biggest companies in the world to recognize risk and optimize performance. The investment from Norwest is particularly notable as this is the first time ACL has taken an outside capital investment. Norwest has helped massive brands like Uber and Spotify grow in the past.

The new investment will be used to accelerate ACL’s consolidation of the massive $36 billion risk and performance software market.

ALSO: ACL Services is hiring in Vancouver

“Today’s announcement is validation of the transformation we have already driven and a strong vote of confidence in our belief that we are best positioned to dominate the massive and underserved market for risk and performance management software,” said Laurie Schultz, president and CEO of ACL.

ACL provides software designed to align the activities of operations, finances, risk, compliance and auditing to create enhanced governance and a more trustworthy execution of the organizational vision. The company has more than 7,000 customers in 140 countries, and nearly 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use ACL’s software.

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Inside ACL’s Vancouver office.

“We are already a fast-growing company, having doubled our SaaS GRC business in each of the last five years and sought an investment partner able to support and accelerate our vision,” said Schultz. “Norwest shares our focus on driving success through a balanced focus on employees, customers and financials, all enabled by a strong corporate culture. This, in combination with Norwest’s industry experience and strategic resources makes for an ideal collaboration.”

On top of accelerating consolidation, the new funding will help ACL expand R&D, add to their sales and marketing pool and potentially even fuel acquisitions of other companies.

“Modern product design, a big data analytics engine, and deep subject matter expertise clearly set the company apart,” said Robert Arditi, partner at Norwest. “ACL already has scale, an industry-changing vision and an impressive customer base. We believe it is the company’s outstanding culture that will drive success in the fractured risk and performance management software space.”

ACL’s most recent fall 2017 release added real-time enterprise risk assessment through data automation in addition to providing industry-specific GRC content and intel.