Lightyear Capital Closes on Sale of Datalot to Centerfield

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Lightyear Capital LLC (“Lightyear”) today announced that an investment fund affiliated with Lightyear has completed the sale of Datalot Inc. (“Datalot”) to Centerfield. 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. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

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, “We are very pleased with the successful outcome of our ownership stake in Datalot. Working with Josh and the entire Datalot team over the last few years has led to strong growth, significantly improving performance with outstanding revenue and EBITDA expansion. We wish them continued success.”

“The insurance industry is a $2.1 trillion market undergoing significant shift toward direct-to-consumer digital distribution. We identified Datalot through our theme-based investment strategy as well positioned in the early innings of the digital adoption,” said Michal Petrzela, Managing Director of Lightyear.

"The entire Datalot team did an outstanding job executing on the plan we laid out with Lightyear in 2017, and Lightyear was a great partner in helping us not just maintain but accelerate growth. We are very excited about our new partnership with Centerfield as we align on compelling growth opportunities and initiatives for Datalot's next chapter,” said Mr. Reznick.

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.