Bionic

Headquartered: London, United Kingdom

Investment date: 2017

Exit date: 2022

Financial Services GRC

https://bionic.co.uk/

At a Glance

4.8x

return on exit

Acquisitions

Best company to work for*

Best Mid-Sized Companies to work for in the UK 2020

How we helped

Bionic is the smart way for Britain’s SMEs to sort their business essentials such as energy, connectivity, insurance and finance. It combines cutting-edge technology with experts who compare trusted UK business suppliers and talk customers through the results on their screen. It is rated Excellent on Trustpilot and is the UK’s market-leading SME marketplace.

Strategic acquisitions:

We worked with Bionic’s management team to build an acquisition strategy, and scope and source acquisition targets.
Bionic has successfully made six acquisitions since ECI’s investment, and significantly expanded its capability offering to customers, providing SMEs more ways to save money on their business essentials.

Sales & marketing:

We worked closely with Bionic on their strategy and how to grow their non-energy offering, which has helped to support their M&A plans.
We supported the Bionic management team with their rebrand from Make it Cheaper to Bionic, representing how their in-house experts are enhanced by technology to provide the best offering to customers.

People & culture:

We invested significantly into the senior leadership team during our investment, bringing in market-leading digital and proposition expertise into the business and delivering on the founders’ succession plans of transitioning to non-exec roles.
We supported the team to build on their fantastic employee experience, with Bionic achieving a successful 7th place ranking in the Top 100 Best Companies to Work For. Find out how they became a Best Companies to Work For.

Tech & data:

Bionic’s technology platform underpins every aspect of its customer service, and they have significantly invested in this capability, including creating a new digital hybrid customer journey and deploying new platforms underpinning finance and insurance.

In 2022 we were delighted to announce the successful secondary sale of Bionic to another private equity firm, delivering a 4.8x return.

I've just been super impressed. If I take a personal element, one area where I had really next to no experience, was of acquisitions, and its something ECI has stacks of experience in. And now we've done a number of acquisitions in my time here.

Paul Galligan

CEO, Bionic

The Bionic growth story

Bionic helps small businesses save money across various central services. So that’s energy, insurance, finance and connectivity. We combine brilliant technology with world class human service, so we have experts on hand to help all of our customers at any time.

First time we went to Bionics offices, the buzz there was amazing and it was instantly obvious it was a very attractive deal for ECI. We met all of the leadership team at ECI and what really stood out was a team of really down to earth individuals, clearly very talented as well that they were only interested in how we could make the business more successful or a better place to work. It was no ego, no nonsense, and I just thought would be a great bunch of people to work with. So it was a transformation from top to bottom actually. That was everything from a brand back at the time when ECI invested the business was called Make It Cheaper.

There was a great service culture at Bionic and we wanted to change the brand to support that positioning of the business.

Aside from the name, we did set about a full digital transformation back at the start of ECI’s investment.

The key innovation was their digital hybrid journey. This is where customers would start their journey online and then finish by talking to one of Bionic experts.

They can explain to you what was going on in the energy market that really helped customer satisfaction and also, of course, increase that conversion rate. When we exited from Bionic and we sold the business to Omos, we retained the stake in the business.

The market opportunity is huge. They’ve got 130,000 SME customers, but there are another 2,000,000 for the business to go after. And Bionic really is the only business of scale to take advantage of that market.

We operate in a market with addressable size of £4 billion, pushing 4 billion in our existing verticals in the UK alone, and so you can imagine we’ve been successful, but against the scale of that marketplace we’ve only just begun so watch this space.

DIVE DEEPER

Listen to our podcast with Paul

In ECI’s podcast, “Building Successful Businesses,” we speak to CEOs about the building blocks of success and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. In Episode 2 we chat to Paul Galligan, CEO of Bionic, about the importance of integrity that he learned working on his Dad’s farm, the biggest lesson from scaling comparethemarket.com, and how becoming more disciplined allowed him to become a better leader.