Higher Logic, the industry-leading engagement platform, announced today its acquisition of Vanilla, a Canadian cloud-based community software company. This acquisition brings together market-leading platforms in the association and corporate markets to serve more customers than any other community solution. At a time when human connection is more important than ever, Higher Logic will expand its offering to customers across new markets and geographies.

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Together, Higher Logic and Vanilla will give its customers more choices with purpose-built community engagement solutions that meet the needs of their use case, industry, and users. Leveraging the power of these two platforms, the deep industry knowledge in two core markets, and the engagement expertise of approximately 400 employees, Higher Logic is positioned to serve current and future customers better than any other community provider.

“We have always been impressed with Vanilla’s commitment to innovation in engagement and their ability to serve key business use cases in the B2B and B2C space for customers like Oracle, TeamViewer, Acer, Charter Communications, and more,” says Higher Logic CEO, Kevin Boyce. “Vanilla’s success in the corporate market complements our success with B2B technology companies like Change Healthcare, Juniper Networks, Imperva, and others. At the same time, our scale, profitability, and accelerating growth will allow us to increase our investment in both the Association and Corporate markets and continue to build industry-leading engagement solutions that connect people, knowledge, and ideas. We are excited to welcome the Vanilla team into the Higher Logic family.”

Higher Logic was founded over 13 years ago as a platform to help associations build engaging destinations, retain their customers and members, and grow their organizations. It has since expanded to also serve the corporate B2B market. Vanilla was founded in 2009 and has helped top brands better engage customers, drive loyalty, empower advocates and reduce support costs. With this acquisition, Higher Logic will intensify its commitment to the association market and corporate B2B market as well as expand its reach to serve the B2C market.  Vanilla is a portfolio company of Level Equity, the NY and CA-based growth equity investor.

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“Higher Logic has a proven track record in building community engagement and facilitating meaningful connections for organizations,” says Vanilla CEO, Luc Vezina. “With more interactions happening digitally, community has become mission-critical for almost every organization. We are thrilled to be joining forces with Higher Logic to create the pre-eminent online community solution.”

“The sale to Higher Logic builds upon Vanilla’s strong market position and exceptional growth over the last several years. The combined organization has the best solution in the enormous and rapidly expanding market for next-generation community engagement solutions,” says Level Equity Principal and Vanilla board member, Gautam Gupta.  “Level Equity is delighted to partner with both Higher Logic’s world-class management team and JMI Equity.”  Level Equity will remain a significant shareholder of the combined business and Gautam Gupta and Ben Levin from Level will join Higher Logic’s board of directors.

“Higher Logic’s focus on serving its 3,000+ customers in two core markets has quadrupled its recurring revenue to over $80 million in just four years since our original investment,” says JMI Equity General Partner and Higher Logic board member, Bob Nye.  “The collective digital engagement expertise positions Higher Logic’s employees and customers well for growth and shared success in this new world.”

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