K1 Capital to Acquire Clarizen in Management Buy Out

Private equity firm K1 Investment Management LLC has partnered with the management team of Israel-based software company Clarizen Inc. to execute a management buy out, CEO Boaz Chalamish told Calcalist in an interview Monday. The sum of the MBO is around $110 million, he added, and K1 has committed to infuse Clarizen with an additional $10 million in the near future, to support growth and expansion.

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Established in 2006 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, with a research and development center in Israel, Clarizen develops and markets online project management and collaborative work service. The company previously raised $90 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, Benchmark, Israel-based venture capital firm Viola Ventures, Opus Capital and DAG Ventures.

Despite listing customers such as video games company Electronic Arts Inc., Dell EMC, Western Union and Cisco Systems, Clarizen has known its shares of ups and downs, and the current move is intended to revitalize the company. According to Linkedin data, the company has shed 17% of its workforce over the last two years.

El Segundo, California-headquartered K1 invests mainly in enterprise software companies. Clarizen is K1's second Israeli investment—in December the firm led a $6.5 funding round for automated phishing prevention startup IronScales Ltd.

Mr. Chalamish replaced Avinoam Nowogrodski, the company’s founder and longtime CEO in 2016. "I realized that to create significant company growth, the investor configuration also needed to be changed," Mr. Chalamish said. "Some of them have been with the company for 12 years."