Hargreaves Lansdown Privatised with CVC Backing

Hargreaves Lansdown has begun life as a private company this year, 2025.  

The UK's largest direct-to-consumer investment platform agreed to be sold to a private equity consortium in August last year (following an initial approach in April) comprised of CVC Advisers, Nordic Capital and Platinum Ivy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

The offer of 1,140 pence per share was a premium of 54% of the share price prior to the April approach and valued the firm at £5.44 billion pounds.

Richard Flint (ex Head of Sky Betting and Gaming, which he led through a period of growth), fulfils the role of Interim CEO, with Darren Worth as Interim CFO. The management are investing in a technology-led transformation to improve HL's propositioning.

Hargreaves Lansdown PLC was delisted from the London Stock Exchange on the 25 March 2025 and initially owned by Harp Bidco Limited, which was renamed in September 2025 to Hargreaves Lansdown Group Limited.

LSEG Shareholders revolt

Votes have been cast against the LSEG's group remuneration report with CEO David Schwimmer taking home £7.8m for the last financial year (with annual bonus doubling to £3m - despite delisting challenges - last year 88 companies left the LSE versus 18 new listings). 

Despite votes against, the resolution was passed at the group's AGM.

A high profile example of a take private was Thoma Bravo's 5bn EUR acquisition of UK cybersecurity firm Darktrace. 

Take privates are attractive if public companies are overlooked or undervalued.

Clearlake and Insight to Acquire Alteryx for $4.4bn

Clearlake Capital Group LP with Insight Partners (co-founded by Colorado-based Twitter investor Jerry Murdock) have agreed to acquire Irvine, CA-based Alteryx (NYSE:AYX), a cloud analytics platform company, in a $4.4bn definitive agreement. Regulatory and stockholder approvals are required.  Alteryx will then become a privately held portfolio company of Clearlake and Insight.

Competitors of Alteryx include Tableau, DataDog and even Microsoft Power BI. 

DataDog has more of a niche around cloud infrastructure metrics and supports AWS, Azure, GCP, RedHat OpenShift and VMWare amongst others and raised substantial capital in a Series D funding round led by ICONIQ Capital.