Infor, a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry, announced an agreement to receive a $1.5 billion investment from shareholders Koch Equity Development, LLC (KED) and Golden Gate Capital.

This investment builds on KED’s investment of more than $2 billion in early 2017, and it represents an important milestone as Infor considers a potential IPO in 2019 or 2020, subject to market conditions.

"Koch and Golden Gate Capital have been phenomenal partners for Infor, and all of our 17,300 employees are excited about this milestone as we prepare for the next stage of growth," said Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor.

Under Phillips' leadership, and over the course of Infor’s partnership with KED and Golden Gate Capital, Infor has invested approximately $2.5 billion in product design and development over the last five years and delivered more than 475 new products, 1,870 integrations, and 20,700 industry features in its CloudSuite product line.  Infor CloudSuite is now the only fully multi-tenant ERP suite spanning front and back office applications, as well as logistics with global support.

“Koch was a customer of Infor before we became an investor in the Company, and Koch Industries’ companies continue to move their most mission critical applications to Infor CloudSuites,” said Jim Hannan, Koch Executive Vice President and CEO, Enterprises Koch Industries.

With over $3 billion of revenue in the fiscal year 2018, Infor became the first company to move mission-critical ERP application suites to public clouds for entire industries. Infor’s CloudSuites is the foundation for digital transformation for more than 9,500 customers in 110 countries. Infor applications span financials, manufacturing, supply chain, human resources, and customer relationships.

Over the last five years, Infor has consistently gained market share in cloud applications, and 70 percent of its software license revenue is now derived from cloud applications. 

Fundamental to Infor’s strategy is its ability to engineer each CloudSuite for a specific industry. Infor eliminates the need for expensive customizations and runaway consulting engagements. Customers routinely lower costs by 25 percent or more by retiring mods, eliminating big bang upgrades, and reducing infrastructure costs after moving to CloudSuite.

Infor has expanded its presence in key industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, the public sector, and hospitality. Over 72 percent of all hospitals in the U.S. run Infor applications, as well as 19 of the top 20 automotive suppliers and 8 of the top 10 fashion brands. 

“Companies see the value in shifting their enterprise applications to the cloud but can’t make that transition until critical industry features are replicated there. Infor built these previously bespoke features as standard cloud services and now has access to valuable data across business functions to build predictive analytics and insightful correlations on our Coleman AI platform,” said Phillips. 

Infor CloudSuite is also future proofed for innovation. Infor applications run on public scale clouds and open source infrastructure not tied to a single data store and scale out at lower costs using commodity compute and storage on demand. Vertical integration is a legacy of on-premise computing, and modern applications leverage global, commodity infrastructure.