Despite a slumping stock price, SciQuest Inc. (Nasdaq: SQST) has made yet another acquisition, this time with HigherMarkets Inc. of San Francisco, CA.
SciQuest says it was an all-stock transaction, which resulted in the issuance of some 650,000 shares worth $442,000. The transaction closed on June 25, when shares of SQST finished trading at 68 cents, near its recent 52-week low of 65 cents.
The stock, which peaked for the year in January when it reached $2.20, closed Wednesday at 66 cents a share, down two cents.
HigherMarkets focuses on providing hosted procurement solutions for the higher education market, which includes universities, colleges, research institutes, and other post-secondary education entities. It has existing contracts with several high-profile customers, such as Indiana University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
Founded in February of 2000, HigherMarkets currently has greater than $1 million in signed contracts. SciQuest says it will recognize this revenue on a subscription basis over the term of the multi-year contracts. SciQuest also adds that what it identified as “key employees” of HigherMarkets will remain with SciQuest.
“The HigherMarkets acquisition opens up a large market opportunity for SciQuest’s software products and professional services capabilities,” Stephen Wiehe, chief executive offer at SciQuest, said in statement. “SciQuest is excited to make a major commitment to serving the procurement needs of the Higher Education market. The HigherMarkets’ team has — built a solid pipeline of prospective customers for procurement solutions and many of these customers have confirmed a need for SciQuest’s other software products, such as chemical inventory tracking.”
Wiehe added that with the addition of HigherMarkets, SciQuest would have the opportunity to reach more than 2,000 potential new customers with over $35 billion of addressable annual procurement spending to create additional scale for our core technologies.
SciQuest is a software, information and services company that provides solutions to research operations for pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other similar organizations.
Earlier this year, the company made two other acquisitions. In February, it bought New Hampshire-based Textco Inc., a supplier of software solutions for molecular biologists, with a mixture of cash and common stock. One month later, SciQuest acquired the enterprise software assets of Concord, MA-based Groton NeoChem in an all-cash deal.
SciQuest: www.sciquest.com
HigherMarkets: www.highermarkets.com
