Lightyear Capital Announces Sale of Datalot to Centerfield

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Lightyear Capital LLC (“Lightyear”) today announced that an investment fund affiliated with Lightyear has signed a definitive agreement to sell Datalot Inc. (“Datalot”) to Centerfield, a technology-driven marketing and customer acquisition company. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 2009, Datalot is a digital distribution platform for the insurance industry. An investment fund affiliated with Lightyear acquired the business in 2017, in partnership with founder and CEO Josh Reznick.

Datalot is purpose built to address the digital distribution needs of the insurance industry, providing a suite of solutions that allows insurance carriers to efficiently generate new customers from digital channels with a fully managed, analytics-driven approach.

The Datalot platform serves more than 40 leading insurance carriers and thousands of agents, across a range of insurance products including auto, home, life, and health. Datalot’s real-time marketplace allows carriers to implement highly customized and precise targeting to improve customer selection, pricing, and underwriting. The platform seamlessly moves consumers between digital and phone channels and delivers millions of qualified consumers to clients’ preferred sales workflow, such as warm phone transfers to agents, live web sessions to digital quoting engines, or full policy sales completed by Datalot’s own licensed agents.

Mark F. Vassallo, Managing Partner of Lightyear, stated, “Our investment in Datalot was rooted in our ongoing thematic focus on the digitization of insurance distribution. We recognized that Datalot’s technology platform positioned the company to be a leading partner to carriers and agents. Under our ownership, Datalot has nearly tripled revenue and quadrupled EBITDA by cultivating deep enterprise relationships, expanding customer-facing and digital marketing capabilities, and entering the fast-growing Medicare market. It has been a pleasure working with Josh and the Datalot team, and we wish them continued success.”

“We are still in the early innings of digital adoption in the insurance industry,” said Josh Reznick. “Our partnership with Lightyear has allowed us to broaden our product offering and to expand our customer base, which now includes most major US carriers. We are grateful to Lightyear for their guidance and support over the past few years, and our entire team is very excited about the uniquely powerful opportunity to combine the Centerfield and Datalot platforms.”

Canaccord Genuity is acting as financial advisor and Davis Polk and Wardwell LLP as legal advisor to Datalot.

About Lightyear Capital LLC

Founded in 2000, Lightyear Capital is a financial services-focused private equity firm based in New York. Through its affiliated private equity funds, Lightyear makes primarily control investments in North America-based, middle-market companies across the financial services spectrum, including asset and wealth management, banking, brokerage, healthcare financial services, insurance, payments and processing, and commercial and consumer finance. The firm brings focus and discipline to its investment process, as well as operating, transaction and strategic management experience, along with significant contacts and resources beyond capital. For more information, please visit www.lycap.com.