Questel

What is Questel?

Questel is a global, fast-growing Intellectual Property (“IP”) information and management specialist. What does Questel do? Questel is an end to end IP solutions provider, offering a comprehensive software suite for searching, analysing and managing inventions and IP assets. Their offering mainly consists of providing access, on a subscription basis, to clients to their IP Business Intelligence (IPBI) and IP Asset Management (IAM) tools The Opportunity Why IK invested in the business: Solid company in a highly resilient and growing space – Questel operates in the highly attractive intellectual property SaaS space. The market for these verticals has grown at an annualised rate of 6-7%, with the Questel growing organically at 11-12%. Diversified, top quality customer base – Questel has a very high quality and sticky customer base across the three verticals. The client list is also highly diversified, with mostly Fortune 500 clients. Mission critical business with sticky and price inelastic customer base – for Questel’s key customers, IP management is a key part of their business and the risk of any of these going wrong / getting delayed is very high as it could, for instance, lead to a delay in a product launch Why we like the investment. “Questel’s technology-led solutions enable its customers to research, protect and manage their intellectual property assets efficiently, in what is an increasingly complex and global intellectual property market. Serving a diversified customer base in the resilient, non-cyclical intellectual property market, Questel has a high proportion of recurring revenues with attractive forward visibility. During IK’s ownership period, we expect Questel to continue to invest in developing its first rate customer proposition, both through continued M&A and new product development.” – Alistair Watson, Senior Investment Director, abrdn.