Granicus Acquires Agenda Tech Company Novusolutions

It's the first acquisition Granicus has made since merging with GovDelivery last year.

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Granicus, not too far removed from merging with GovDelivery, has acquired the agenda and meeting management software company Novusolutions.

The move will bring together two companies with a significant amount of product overlap — both offer tools for state and local government entities to automate agenda and meeting minute processes. Granicus CEO Mark Hynes, who joined the company in February, said there were enough feature differences between Novusolutions and Granicus products to justify joining them.

“Novusolutions has built a nice business in the legislative management space, so we’ve had our eye on them for some time,” he said. “They’ve grown in the market and have demonstrated some strong technology and a good customer base.”

That latter component — the customer base — is where there’s less overlap. Both serve state and local government, but Hynes said Novusolutions has a particularly strong presence among county governments. Novusolutions also has more niche clients than Granicus.

“They had made some inroads at education and special district boards that we had not yet turned our attention to,” Hynes said.

He declined to name how many customers Novusolutions has, but a press release from the company said there are more than 3,000 U.S. and U.K. clients between them. When Granicus and GovDelivery announced their merger in October, they totaled about 2,000 clients.

There are more similarities between Novusolutions and Granicus; both are more than a decade old and both have long offered their products through the cloud in a software-as-a-service model.

Granicus remains a portfolio company of Vista Equity Partners, putting it on a path that investors typically hope leads to quick business growth amid mergers and acquisitions.

According to Hynes, Novusolutions managing partners Jay Vickers and John Kercher will both stay on at the company in “substantial” roles, though he said the specifics have not yet been worked out.

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Ben Miller is the associate editor of data and business for Government Technology. His reporting experience includes breaking news, business, community features and technical subjects. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lives in Sacramento, Calif.