Peak Rock Acquires Aegis Software
Aegis Industrial Software announced yesterday that it has been acquired by Peak Rock Capital.
Aegis is one of the leading suppliers of MES (Manufacturing Execution System) software within the SMTA (Surface-Mount Technology Assembly) founded in 1996 by Jason Spera and John Walls.
Following the acquisition of Cogiscan by iTAC, who had also been previously acquired by the Dürr Group, I asked Jason at Apex Expo 2023 whether he would sell the business.
To paraphrase his reply, he said 'everyone has a price'. My reply was simply to hang in there, as the industry is only just getting exciting.
I asked him as I thought their partnership with venture funded Arch Systems may have opened them up to new sources of financial investment opportunities.
I'm pleased for now Jason and his co-founder are hanging in there but the playbook is well defined with acquisitions and after three years it can mean leaving as the Cogiscan founders have done or taking a Chairmanship role if they are wanting something more part time.
In the short to midterm Peak Rock is likely to acquire other companies with synergies and allow one of the businesses to be the lead, as Dürr Group did to iTAC and ASMPT did to SIPLACE.
As with the Dürr Group strategy, there is likely to be diversification out of SMTA to other manufacturing or data-crunching industries.
While these business stories are becoming repetitive of investors repackaging and remarketing companies to look like they are growing in a stagnant market - it's good for me to show interested parties the common growth path of a software business within SMTA.
About 4IR.UK British Systems
We are a Smart Factory solutions provider for the SMT Electronics Assembly manufacturing industry. We were founded in 2016 after the support of a seed funded Business Accelerator. We create hardware Adaptors that operate in more than 20 countries that extend the life of SMEMA based manufacturing equipment by providing solutions for production monitoring and supporting data connections to the Hermes Standard and the Connected Factory Exchange CFX. We also develop Software Extensions for the Low-Code No-Code MultiPlug Edge Computing Platform. The flexibility of off-the-shelf software combined with inside industrial experience means that 4IR.UK is ideally placed to anticipate and respond to a factory's changing needs.
