Invigor splashes $4.5m on Menulog and GetPrice backers

ASX-listed solutions provider Invigor Group has recruited the experts behind web successes Menulog and GetPrice through a $4.5 million takeover of their company, while also opening a development centre in India.

Web entrepreneurs Gary Munitz and Daniel Sekers have joined the Invigor board as a result of its acquisition of Global Group Australia.

"We're winning significant business on big data projects," said Invigor's executive chairman Gary Cohen. "And Global has been very good at big data... we're leveraging their intellectual property and know-how."

Cohen told CRN that the acquisition was worth over $4.5 million. Invigor was already a 40 percent minority owner for "about two years" but now has 100 percent ownership as a result of the deal.

Global employed 15 staff at the time of the takeover and all have transitioned into Invigor, according to Cohen.

The growth in big data revenue was coming from helping customers analyse their own internal processes, the chairman said: "We currently have a pipeline of over a million dollars between just two deals alone."

To meet the demands of such growth, Invigor also announced that a development centre has been established in Chennai, India. Cohen said that the centre had been created from scratch without assistance from an outsourcing partner.

"We previously built development centres in Chennai and Bangalore, when did healthcare IT [with previous company iSOFT]. We brought over people from that experience to help with this new centre," he told CRN.

"When we ran iSOFT, we had 2500 people in India."

Invigor Group's Chennai operation has opened with 20 people, but that head count will go up to 40 "within a few months".

The activities demonstrate a turnaround for Invigor after a gloomy annual report for the year ending 31 December 2013, in which the directors said that without further funding the company would "have difficulty continuing to operate as a going concern".

"We did capital-raising at the beginning of this year. We brought in a major investor, who has taken a reasonable stake in the business," Cohen told CRN.

"We are now bringing together strong projects. In the coming weeks we'll have some clever announcements, transformative work," said the director. "We've been focused on building our own business since we took over from the former board."

Invigor had a long-running battle over 2012 and 2013 to complete an asset sale to a now-bankrupt US company – a transaction instigated by the previous board. That exposure took up "considerable time and effort during 2013" to manage, said the directors in the annual report.