activpayroll secures investment from UK private equity firm Tenzing

Founded in 2001 by CEO Alison Sellar OBE, activpayroll, headquartered in Aberdeen, is a leading global professional service organisation, providing integrated global and domestic payroll solutions; expatriate taxation services and online HR people management tools to over 1,000 companies in more than 140 countries worldwide.

With offices in Australia, Singapore, Dubai, South Africa, Germany, France, the UK and the USA activpayroll has one of the most experienced international payroll and expatriate tax teams in the world.

Customers typically have multi-country requirements with headcounts ranging between 50 to 5,000 employees and are from a vast range of business sectors. The business delivers a highly differentiated service serving complex customer needs and jurisdictions from these operational hubs as well as through its trusted network of in-country partners.

In recent years activpayroll has achieved exciting growth in combination with expanding its geographical footprint and service offering.

Tenzing Private Equity is an independent private equity firm, based in London, that targets investments in high growth businesses, across the UK and Ireland. Founded in 2015, the firm invests in niche market leaders and challenger businesses across a broad range of industry sectors.

The firm believes in supporting, inspiring and investing alongside high energy, high performance management teams with which it has a shared vision. Tenzing brings unique access to a select group of entrepreneurs, its Entrepreneurs Panel, who have founded and grown some of the best lower middle market SMEs through multiple successful phases of private equity investment. Access to this growth ecosystem provides the Tenzing portfolio companies with unrivalled insight, experience and mentoring to support their high growth development.

Tenzing has backed activpayroll’s senior management team, led by founder CEO Alison Sellar and COO Euan Sellar. Tenzing’s investment, its team and its Entrepreneurs Panel will support the company with continued technical product development, investment in sales and developing its acquisition and international strategy, to ensure the business continues to expand and remains at the forefront of the global payroll market.

Alison Sellar, Founder and CEO of activpayroll, commented “Over recent years activpayroll has expanded significantly whilst maintaining an extremely high level of customer satisfaction and this must be attributed to the activpayroll team. We look forward to working in close cooperation with the Tenzing team and accessing their growth eco-system to continue the exciting activpayroll journey.

Guy Gillon, Managing Partner at Tenzing, said: “We’re absolutely delighted to have backed Alison, Euan and the activpayroll team to take activpayroll on the journey to becoming the undisputed market leader in international payroll. We are as excited as the activpayroll team about the next stage of their impressive journey and share their significant ambitions for the business. We are very much looking forward to supporting the team at this exciting time.”

activpayroll was advised on the investment by PwC Corporate Finance and Addleshaw Goddard. Tenzing was advised by Atlantra Corporate Finance, PwC, Osborne Clarke, Intuitus, & Continuum.

This investment supports activpayroll’s strategic vision to continue to expand both domestically and internationally whilst delivering best in class bespoke payroll and mobility solutions to customers, large or small across all industry sectors.