The acquisition of the company heloo is indirectly also the first investment of the American fund Blackstone in Croatia

The global financial giant and the largest private equity fund in the world, the American Blackstone, is the majority owner of the global market leader in outsourcing, TaskUs, which recently acquired the Croatian company heloo. This acquisition is therefore indirectly also Blackstone’s first investment in Croatia.

Blackstone, headquartered in New York, managed assets worth approximately $880 billion last year. It was founded by Stephen Schwarzman, who is still at the helm of the fund, and Peter Peterson. They engage in private equity investments, real estate investments, hedge funds, etc. When it comes to private equity investments, they have invested $125 billion and have a portfolio of 106 companies. Market experts say that Blackstone is known for its active involvement in the companies it invests in.

In TaskUs, Blackstone invested $275 million for a majority stake in ownership in 2018. Last year, it made a partial exit through TaskUs’s IPO, but despite the reduction in stake, it remains the majority owner. With TaskUs’s listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange, Blackstone achieved a return on investment of five times. TaskUs raised $300 million in the IPO, and the company’s valuation was around $2.5 billion. Before Blackstone’s investment, TaskUs was valued at approximately $500 million.

The startup TaskUs was founded in 2008 by Bryce Maddock and Jaspar Weir and quickly brought it to one of the fastest-growing companies in its industry globally. Today, TaskUs is a leading provider of specialized outsourcing services, and the acquisition of the Croatian company heloo is the first acquisition in the history of this American company. TaskUs provides outsourcing services for digital services and next-generation customer support to rapidly growing tech companies. TaskUs relies on cloud-based infrastructure and provides services to clients in the fastest-growing sectors such as social media, e-commerce, gaming, streaming media, food delivery, and ride-sharing, as well as in high-tech, financial, and health technology sectors. At the end of 2021, TaskUs had 40,100 employees at 23 locations in ten different countries, including the USA, the Philippines, and India.

The domestic company heloo was founded by Domagoj Makar and Tomislav Pleša in 2017 in Zagreb and provides customer support outsourcing services. Its client list includes numerous European tech companies with high growth rates and a strong presence in the e-commerce and gaming sectors. Employees of the company heloo provide services in 20 different languages across a total of eight countries in the region. Thanks to its omnichannel model in customer approach and remote service offerings, heloo regularly records double-digit revenue growth.

Additionally, Blackstone is indirectly connected to Croatia as a minority owner of the Romanian betting company Superbet, which has acquired the Croatian companies Axilis of Bruna Kovačević and Score Alarm of Ivan Klarić, and it also has an innovation development center in Croatia. In 2019, Superbet secured an investment of €175 million from Blackstone, partly thanks to Score Alarm’s technology. Score Alarm, after rebranding in 2021, operates under the name Superology.

Otherwise, Blackstone was most mentioned in Croatia about a decade ago as one of the financiers of the failed Agrokor. Together with the then Croatian company owned by Ivica Todorić, it made an offer in 2008 to acquire the Turkish retail chain Migros, but they were unsuccessful.