£120m Causeway investment sets UK record

Rothschild & Co has invested £120m in construction tech company Causeway in what is believed to be the largest private equity investment in a British tech firm working in property or construction.

Headquartered in Buckinghamshire, Causeway provides enterprise and cloud software tools to the construction and infrastructure maintenance industries. The platform includes products for planning, construction, maintenance and trade with the goal of catering to the entire supply chain.

For example, Causeway’s biometric labour management platform centralises all relevant data – attendance, payroll, labour tracking, health & safety and so on – on the cloud. A biometric tablet provides contractors with security options that include facial recognition and fingerprint sensors.

Phil Brown, CEO and executive chairman of Causeway, said that the company is building a “persona-based platform” with relevant applications for everyone involved in a construction project, one that is compatible with third-party applications.

The £120m investment came from Five Arrows Principal Investments, the European corporate private equity arm of Rothschild & Co., in return for a “significant” minority stake in Causeway.

Causeway said it had seen an earnings compound annual growth rate of 31% since 2015 driven by increased industry adoption of technology alongside acquisitions that have grown its product portfolio.

Five Arrows’ investment will fund other strategic acquisitions and accelerate Causeway’s organic growth strategy to further “digitally connect the construction supply chain”.

In recent months, the company has made several acquisitions, including specialist construction telemarketing business Enhance Consultancy and Paris-based mobile development company Ermeo.

Brown said: “This investment marks another leap forward for our business and for the value we can add to our customers. Our core purpose and passion is to digitally enable the global construction industry – the support of Five Arrows allows us to accelerate our work to help solve our customers’ challenges.

“Our ambition is to ensure that data flows seamlessly across the construction process, making our customers more efficient and their data more useful and actionable. This is the only way to drive better project outcomes, especially around value and quality.”

Following completion of the transaction, Vivek Kumar and Sacha Oshry of Five Arrows will join Causeway’s board.