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Last week it was announced that Lightyear Capital, a private equity firm focused on financial services, had acquired a controlling stake in e-discovery company Lighthouse Technologies. The amount of the transaction is undisclosed but Lighthouse's senior management team and existing investors will remain shareholders.

Brian McManus, CEO of Lighthouse, said that the investment will help to accelerate the ongoing growth of the technology services provider, which specializes in the areas of e-discovery, information services and compliance. The company is already preparing to open an office in Frankfurt, Germany, with eyes on eventually moving into Asia and continuing to expand its size.

“We'll probably be a little more aggressive with mergers and acquisitions than we've been historically,” McManus said.

The company has been actively leveling up in size and scale for some time now, starting with an announcement in 2016 that saw the legal services provider team up with Rackspace to open two new data centers in the U.K.

Shortly thereafter came a $30 million investment from private equity backer Spire Capital directed toward promoting the e-discovery provider's future growth, which would include the 2017 acquisition of Discovia as well as Forexus, a Swiss consulting and chat discovery group Lighthouse picked up in March.

McManus indicated that the company would build upon its strength with e-discovery and information governance tools such as analytics to begin venturing more deeply into compliance-related services.

“I think these markets start to develop further and further overlapping concentric circles,” McManus said.

Those overlapping circles are part of the reason that a private equity group focused primarily on financial services became interested in the company. Mark Vassallo, the managing partner at Lightyear, pointed toward an opportunity for the firm to participate in a growing field.

“It's something that we've been studying over several years as we've looked at the exploding volume of information that needs to be captured protected and sorted through for any regulatory or legal authority that comes and asks,” Vassallo said.

The Forexus acquisition back in 2017 was motivated in part by Lighthouse's desire to broaden appeal among its financial services clients, but there's still plenty of work to be done.

According to Vassallo, Lighthouse remains relatively underexposed in the financial services industry, which represents a third of the marketplace.

“So part of our value creation plan will be to help the company position their products towards financial services firms like banks, investment banks and insurance companies,” Vassallo said.