Private equity firm Bridgepoint has reportedly agreed to take majority control of Kyriba, the provider of treasury management software for corporate finance executives. The deal said to value the San Diego-based company at around $1.2 billion.

According to the report, Bridgepoint will own roughly 75% of the company when the transaction is completed, with most of Kyriba’s institutional investors opting to sell their stakes.

Venture investors in Kyriba, led by chief executive Jean-Luc Robert since 2003, include Mangrove Capital Partners and Upfront Ventures, which were among early investors in 2001. Bpifrance, Iris Capital and Sumeru Equity Partners are among the investors in the firm.

Bridgepoint’s ambitions

For London-based Bridgepoint, which acquired UK-based foreign exchange platform Moneycorp for £212 million in 2012, the latest investment is said to represent a major step in the firm’s recent move to build its US portfolio. With Kyriba, it acquires a platform that offers a range of cash management, analytics and cross-border payment functions.

In a world of increasingly global financial operations, CFOs have turned to cloud-based software such as Kyriba for visibility and compliance controls over vast accounting, banking and foreign exchange processes This is reflected in the deal’s valuation, as it compares with one of around $350 million that investors apparently gave the company in a 2017 founding round.

Bridgepoint, which opened its first office in San Francisco last November,  also said to be in advanced talks with asset manager BlackRock to sell eFront, a French financial services software specialist that it acquired in 2015 for €300 million.

Kyriba says it has partnerships and software integrations with companies that include BlackRock and also payments specialist WorldFirst and Ripple Labs, a venture-backed global payments platform based on blockchain technology.

Last month Kyriba announced the launch of a new application programming interface (API) with Citi to assist faster payments and standardisation.