Energy market software company Energy Exemplar has been bought

Blackstone and Vista have bought Adelaide-based energy market software company Energy Exemplar for a rumoured $US1bn.

Energy market software company Energy Exemplar has been acquired.

Adelaide-based software company Energy Exemplar has been acquired by private equity firms Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners for an estimated $1.6bn.

The company’s Plexos software allows its users to model markets across all energy sources including electricity, gas and water.

Energy Exemplar was founded by Glenn Drayton in 1999 as Drayton Analytics, following the completion of his doctoral thesis at the University of Canterbury.

In mid-2000 the first version of Plexos was released, and the company has grown to employ 385 staff across eight offices, and claims to be growing at 35 per cent annually.

Energy Exemplar was owned by investment fund Riverside, which bought into the company in 2017.

“During our partnership with EE’s Founder Glenn Drayton, we recruited CEO David Wilson and built an effective international management team and grew the employee base by seven times,’’ Riverside Australia Fund managing partner Simon Feiglin said.

“We also scaled a small Adelaide-based software business into 79 countries with major offices in India, United Kingdom, North America and Singapore by establishing a global presence in sales, marketing, customer support and product development.”

Energy Exemplar said the deal with Blackstone and Vista “gains new resources to help accelerate growth and drive platform innovation in support of grid reliability and the energy transition’’.

“We are tremendously excited about this partnership and how it will accelerate our investment in our leading SaaS (software as a service) platform providing accurate simulation and decision support for our customers in today’s rapidly changing energy landscape,” Mr Wilson said.

“The combination of Blackstone and Vista brings a unique level of expertise in both the energy and software industries which will continue to propel Energy Exemplar as the go-to solution for the energy transition for all our clients around the world who are leading this charge.”

Energy Exemplar said utilities, power producers, grid system operators, and others in the energy transition ecosystem use its software to forecast market operations, drive long-term investments, and optimise their operations.

“Energy Exemplar’s solutions offer best-in-class functionality, allowing users to model and understand the increasingly complex energy transition landscape in a single unified platform,’’ the company said.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal counsel, and William Blair served as financial advisor to Blackstone and Vista.

Lazard acted as sole financial advisor, and Jones Day and Herbert Smith Freehills served as legal counsel to Energy Exemplar.