Accordent Buyout Provides Exit for San Diego’s TVC Capital

San Diego-based TVC Capital, a small private equity firm focused on software investments, realized a gain in Pleasanton, CA-based Polycom’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PLCM]]) $50 million cash acquisition of El Segundo, CA-based Accordent Technologies.

In a statement today, Pleasanton, CA-based Polycom’s Sudhakar Ramakrishna says, “We believe Accordent has the most elegant video content management solution on the market. This transaction positions Polycom at the forefront of end-to-end video content and management.”

TVC Managing Partner Jeb Spencer, who served as chairman of Accordent’s board, tells me in a note this morning that TVC was Accordent’s lone institutional investor, putting $4 million into the company in 2006. TVC Managing Partner Steve Hamerslag also served on the board.

“TVC takes an activist approach to its software acquisitions and investments and believes in a more bootstrapped approach to growing technology companies,” Spencer says. “Accordent’s small raise of $4 million was enough capital to build the leading US enterprise video content management company.”

Accordent’s technology enables users to capture digital video content whether it is being used to deliver highly scalable live webcasts from a studio, providing automated rich media webcasting from the meeting or classroom, adding a streaming extension to videoconferences or enabling user-generated content from the desktop. The deal expands Polycom’s total available market by $500 million, according to data from market research firm Wainhouse Research. In addition, Wainhouse says the market for this video management segment is projected to generate a compounded annual growth rate of 32 percent through 2014 to $1.2 billion. And as a strategic partner with Microsoft, Accordent deepens Polycom’s integration with Microsoft Lync and Sharepoint.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.