One of Chattanooga’s most successful tech startups is getting a new owner.
Skuid, a low-code cloud platform that helps customize sales force app design and development, will be acquired next year by Nintex, a Bellevue, Washington-based workflow automation company.
“Low-code/no-code development platforms are types of visual software development environments that allow enterprise developers and citizen developers to drag and drop application components, connect them together and create mobile or web apps,” according to techtarget.com. “Low-code and no-code modular approaches let professional developers quickly build applications by relieving them of the need to write code line by line.”
Terms of the sale were not announced in the sales agreement, but company officials expect the purchase to be completed within the next month.
The coding company Skuid, whose name is an acronym for Scalable Kit for User Interface Design, is owned by Marlin Equity Partners, which acquired Skuid in 2019 and has since pumped new capital into the company to help scale up its operations. From its start in 2013 when founder Ken McElrath began Skuid with five employees, the company has grown to more than 150 employees who work with more than 600 companies to design, build and deploy business applications that bring together data and workflows from across their organizations.
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“Skuid has an incredible product that allows customers to build engaging applications for complex business needs using low-code technologies,” Niranjan Vijayaragavan, chief product officer at Nintex, said in an announcement of the purchase agreement. “Combining Skuid with Nintex’s powerful process automation portfolio, unified through a shared platform, will allow customers to easily build holistic digital experiences to drive efficiency and speed, instilling decision-making confidence across their business. The complementary nature of our capabilities makes this acquisition a fantastic fit.”
Skuid was on the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in America every year from 2018 through 2021.
Nintex works with more than 10,000 businesses and organizations — including more than half of the Fortune 500 companies — to help automate business processes. Vijayaragavan said the Nintex Process Platform accelerates digital transformations by quickly and easily managing, automating and optimizing business processes.
“Like the Nintex team, we want operational leaders across a business to own powerful technologies to drive intelligence and efficiency for their teams,” Ryan Niemann, CEO of Skuid, said in a statement about the sale of the company. “Skuid is a perfect extension of the Nintex Process Platform, and together we can help business leaders continuously design, create and deliver powerful apps that streamline operations and make significant impact.”
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Niemann said Skuid’s app development products “put more power into the business to design and build applications that solve problems for their team.”
“Successful Skuid customers focus on building apps that deliver rapid return on investment, such as consolidating data across finance and HR systems to make it intuitive for day-to-day users or consolidating tools to drive productivity for a sales team,” Nintex said in a news release about its Skuid acquisition.
Earlier this year, Skuid relocated its offices into the co-working space at the Somer Station in North Chattanooga. Nintex officials declined Wednesday to discuss their future plans for Skuid until the purchase is complete.
The pending acquisition of Skuid is the latest in a handful of tech purchases by Nintex in the past four years, including Kryon in February 2022, AssureSign in June 2021, K2 Software in October 2020 and EnableSoft in March 2019. The private equity firm TPG Capital bought a majority stake in Nintex in 2021.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6340.