The Fintech Company Clark Closed a €100 Million Deal

At the end of last year, the Frankfurt-based fintech company Clark announced an acquisition: The company behind the insurance app announced it was acquiring Finanzen Group. With its Finanzen.de website, the Allianz subsidiary had specialized in the business of contacts from potential insurance customers – so-called leads. After the deal, Clark declared itself “a unicorn and one of the largest insurtech companies in the world,” and was valued by its backers at more than $1.04 billion (€1 billion).

How did the company come to this valuation? Last year, the company remained ironclad in its silence on the subject. Even now, no details are leaking out; the company still doesn’t want to comment. However, the minutes of the shareholders’ meetings now allow some exciting conclusions to be drawn about the acquisition for the first time:

As can be seen from the documents, the deal consists of two steps, which are quite common. In order to finance the takeover, Clark once again collected money from its shareholders. The largest tranche came from the existing investor Tencent. The direct bank ING, which had once taken a stake in Clark in the course of cooperation, also participated in the financing round – although the cooperation was terminated again. Other investors also participated.

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Another $104 million (€100 million) in cash

In a second step, Clark took over the shares of “Mercato Leadmanagement Investments Holdings GmbH”, which is Finanzen.de. In return, Allianz received shares from Clark – and not by a small margin. After the deal, the company will own around 24 percent. On the other hand, the document states: “The company will make a payment to ASI (an Allianz company) in the amount of $1.04 billion (€1 billion), by which a part of the value of the contribution in kind exceeding the total amount of the new shares will be compensated.” Accordingly, an additional $104 million (€100 million) will flow in cash. It is thus certainly one of the largest fintech deals in Germany.

Part of the money will certainly come from the financing round. “It is quite possible that Clark has taken in additional loans for the deal,” said an industry insider. The financing round involves Kreos, which also offers loan financing. This is quite common in such deals, he added.

Nevertheless, the investors are likely to have put a large amount into the company. If the billion-euro valuation is correct – and there were doubts about that – Clark should have raised at least $78 million (€75 million). But it could also be more.

In this scenario, the value of the acquisition would then be $354 million (€340 million) (=$250 million (€240 million) for the Clark shares + $104 million (€100 million) in cash). Clark would thus have managed to roughly triple its own company valuation in the course of a year. This still seems ambitious.

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(Featured image by Sinan Erg via Unsplash)

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