Atlanta-based Noro-Moseley Partners has closed on an oversubscribed eighth fund (NMP VIII) to invest in growing healthcare technology and software companies. At $180 million, this is Noro-Moseley’s largest fund since the dot-com boom, and one of the largest active funds in the Southeast.
“We really got a broad base of support, which we’re excited about,” Noro-Moseley General Partner Alan Taetle tells Hypepotamus. That included existing LPs, as well as several new ones.
Taetle and Managing General Partner Allen Moseley have worked together for two-plus decades to refine their model and investment thesis. Since their start, they have invested over $800 million in 200-plus companies.
In that time, they’ve helped realize some of the biggest technology exits in the Southeast: Wellcentive, acquired by Philips; Clearleap, sold to IBM; Virtustream, sold to Dell EMC for $1.2 billion; Vocalocity, acquired by Vonage; and SecureWorks, sold to Dell.
Since only 2013, the firm has generated over $3 billion in exit value.
Taetle oversees software investments, while Moseley heads up the health IT and healthcare services vertical.
“It’s been a strategy that’s allowed us to continue to gain real domain expertise in those verticals,” says Moseley. “In this market, to get access to the best companies, you have to have real domain knowledge around the particular space that they’re in.”
“You have to back great teams, great market opportunities, but to get access to those, you have to be bringing something to that story.”
Noro-Moseley typically leads investments, often coming in as the first institutional capital for young companies raising a Series A. Moseley says they look for solid product validation, ROI validation, and typically, some revenue.
For example, their most recently-announced investment was leading an $11M Series A for Atlanta-based software firm Revenue Analytics. Though the company has been in operation for over a decade, it recently switched from a human capital-heavy approach to a cloud-based software service.
The Series A was the company’s first institutional round.
The Noro-Moseley team continues to see successful exits on a regular basis, such as PR measurement and reporting startup TrendKite’s acquisition by Cision for $225 million earlier this year.
A few months prior, virtual workspace startup FSLogix was acquired by Microsoft for an undisclosed amount, less than one year after Noro-Moseley’s initial investment.
Though Noro-Moseley has spurred much growth and found success in the Atlanta technology scene, Taetle says they have also been making inroads in other markets. Most notably, he points out Austin, Minneapolis, Denver, and Nashville.
“Atlanta will always be a core market for us, but we’ve also gone into markets where we can marry our industry expertise with a geography that we think is exciting for growth companies.”
The firm projects doing about 18-20 deals over the lifecycle of this fund, with two active portfolio companies already (the aforementioned Revenue Analytics being one of them).
Taetle is particularly interested in cybersecurity, supply chain and e-commerce enablement, and speciality cloud services.
Moseley says he’s searching for companies where Noro-Moseley’s strong strategic LP base can enable growth. The fund has several large health insurance plans and hospital systems as LPs.
“You really need both the view of the payor and the provider,” Moseley says. He works closely with these LPs to facilitate communication with the portfolio companies.
“We’re not aspiring for unicorn valuations, but we’re selling companies in the hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, of dollars,” says Taetle. “We’re evidence of the success that you can find in these secondary markets.”
