Today MFiles, the USA/Finnish ECM company, announced that it had acquired London-based collaboration/filesharing firm Hubshare. It’s only the second acquisition that MFiles has made, the last being the 2017 buy of Aprento and AI/NLP vendor. Surprisingly, MFiles has made so few acquisitions as it has been around 1989 and has raised over $157m and is currently at series C in funding rounds, having closed $79m of that in January this year.
Though this is a small tuck investment, it is an attractive one. Hubshare, though not well known outside of the UK, provides a range of Intranet/Extranet product functionality through a workspace portal. Though there is some overlap with MFile’s existing document management offering, it extends the firm a little more into the digital workspace market. At Deep Analysis, we have seen a significant uptick in Intranets and Knowledge Management’s interest over the past year or so, mainly accelerated by the enforced distributed and hybrid workplace environment. Still, it’s a trend set to continue over the coming years.
MFiles has been adapting to changing times, increasing its SaaS revenues and making efforts to expand beyond the US & Northern Europe. However, it remains a smaller player in the market than IBM, OpenText, and Hyland. It has worked hard to raise its profile over recent years. It will be interesting to see if MFiles makes more tuck-in acquisitions over the next year or indeed be the target of a deal itself. Either way, the announcement this week continues the trend of investments in broad ECM the market in 2021.