Meet Merlin Piscitelli, Chief Revenue Officer, EMEA at SaaS Solutions Provider for M&A: Datasite

Datasite is an innovative and market leading cloud-based software provider for the mergers and acquisition industry, empowering dealmakers in the investment banking, corporate development, private equity and legal professions around the world with the tools they need to succeed across the entire deal lifecycle.

Our secure, advanced platform facilitates more than 13,000 deals annually including corporate actions, such as mergers and acquisitions, restructurings or initial public offerings. The company has been around for more than 50 years and has offices in most major cities, supporting customers with 24/7/365 service in 20 languages.

Datasite | Premier SaaS Solutions for M&A

What was behind the idea for the company?

Datasite was originally founded as Merrill Corporation in 1968 as a financial printing business. We developed our platform and virtual data room (VDR) application in 2002 to help dealmakers share information in a secure space during the due diligence process.

Following our digital transformation in 2018, we focused solely on helping dealmakers streamline the capital transaction process with secure collaborative software that shortens timelines for conducting due diligence. In the last two years, Datasite has moved beyond the virtual data room to support advisors and their clients across the entire deal lifecycle from deal sourcing and deal preparation to post-merger integration (PMI).

We continue to innovate our platform and applications using advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate tasks, helping dealmakers be more efficient and effective.

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

The pandemic changed everything, including how and where we work. Dealmaking was no exception. The pandemic accelerated dealmakers’ use of technology to increase their productivity during an especially strong M&A market. And despite today’s choppier market conditions, this adaptation isn’t going away. Most global dealmakers expect to use even more technology to conduct and execute their deals in the next 12 months.

This means tools for managing the dealmaking process need to be front and center and supported by a centralized platform from which all collaborators can access.

Throughout the pandemic, we continued to invest in innovation, including introducing three new products to help dealmakers market assets, prepare assets or acquire assets. We’ve also recently completed the first part of upgrading Datasite’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to improve our customer and employee experience. This focus has helped us continue to grow to more than 1,000 employees and increased our revenue by 37% in the last two years. We also completed an acquisition, to expand into new markets.

Dealmakers in more than 170 countries make their deals in Datasite, including 74 of the top 100 legal firms and all the top 20 global financial advisory firms. In 2021, Datasite facilitated more than a third of the top 100 global deals, including a third of the top 61 US deals, and close to half of the top 25 EMEA deals.

What can we hope to see from Datasite in the future?

In dealmaking, speed is key. The longer the process runs, the higher the risk that a deal goes cold and potentially unravels. So, dealmakers need tools that help them manage the M&A process effectively, efficiently and reliably.

As an M&A technology partner, we will continue to invest in innovation, applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate many of the more time consuming and mundane tasks in the M&A management process. For example, this has included automating outreach to, and tracking of, potential buyers; automatically categorizing thousands of documents in minutes; allocating and indexing these into appropriate folders; and bulk redacting sensitive information and data in seconds to ensure regulatory compliance. These innovations not only address customer pain points, but also enable dealmakers to focus on higher-order activities, such as strategy.

As a company, we are also focused on growth and to that end, we continue to invest in the expansion of our sales, product and service teams.

 

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