Grant Thornton takes majority stake in Cork-based Valid8me

Grant Thornton has announced a €12.5 million investment in the Cork-headquartered software company formerly known as Horizon8.

As part of the transaction, the professional services giant will take a majority stake in the business, renamed Valid8me earlier this year, with its US and Chinese owners exiting the business. The company opened its European headquarters in Cork in 2019.

Valid8me, which makes software that allows businesses to store and manage customer-related data, said the €12.5 million investment by Grant Thornton will be used to increase its Irish headcount to more than 50 by the end of the year and to accelerate its global growth.

Founded in 2004, it began life as a partnership between US financial services company State Street, Chinese IT company Insigma and Zhejiang University in China. Originally called Hengtian, it changed its name to Horizon8 in 2019.

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Grant Thornton now holds a majority stake in Valid8me along with chief executive Patrick Horgan and chief product officer Ciarán Corkery, a spokesman for the company confirmed. Valid8me’s shares are held by a Boston-registered entity, Hengtian Services, according to its 2020 annual return, filed last November.

Companies Registration Office filings show that Michael McAteer, managing partner at Grant Thornton Ireland, and Stephen Tennant, head of financial services advisory at the accounting firm, joined the board of the company in late March, shortly before it changed its name to Valid8me.

In a statement, Mr McAteer said Valid8Me’s platform is “complementary” to a number of Grant Thornton’s service lines across “a number of sectors including financial services, legal, accounting, wealth management and real estate among others”.

Mr Tennant said that Valid8me provides a “ground-breaking” solution to problems that many businesses have when looking to on-board clients and verify their identities.

“We use valid8Me ourselves and have first-hand experience of how it has transformed our client onboarding processes,” he said.

The company lost over €358,000 in 2020, its most recent set of accounts reveal.

In a note attached to the accounts, Valid8me’s directors said it was still “in the development stage of its life cycle” and highlighted the Covid-19 pandemic, which they said had “directly impacted the company’s growth”. However, the directors said that “a number of new clients” had been added since the end of the 2020 financial year, including a pipeline of several “high quality prospective clients”.