There is a particular sort of software nobody discusses at dinner. It remembers which boat belongs in which marina berth. It tells a flooring shop what is in stock, what must be cut and who is installing it. It keeps a golf competition moving, a veterinary clinic’s diary straight and a restaurant’s tables talking to its till. The interfaces are rarely famous. The workflows are indispensable. ClearCourse has made a business of collecting them.
Founded in London in 2018 with backing from the financial-services investor Aquiline Capital Partners, ClearCourse began as a consolidation project for membership and event-management software. Founding CEO Gerry Gualtieri and founding M&A chief Joshua Rowe had a plain assignment: buy sound, specialised UK software companies, help them grow and make payments work more efficiently. The remit widened. Today the group says it owns more than 40 brands across field services, healthcare, hospitality, retail, sports and leisure, and public-sector and not-for-profit work.
Its customer list is an inventory of the British commercial back room: independent garages, hotels, clubs, clinics, garden centres, tradespeople, charities and councils. ClearCourse is not trying to persuade all of them to use the same generic dashboard. It owns the companies that already speak their language. Then it adds engineering capacity, finance, legal help, cybersecurity, marketing and, most consequentially, its ClearAccept payments platform.
The portfolio is eclectic. The cash register is the plot.
A traditional software roll-up can stop at recurring subscription revenue and cost savings. ClearCourse goes looking for the transaction inside the workflow. A hotel takes a deposit. A clinic bills a patient. A club collects dues. A retailer closes a sale. ClearAccept can sit inside the software at that exact moment, supporting cards, Apple Pay, Direct Debit, recurring charges, links, phone and face-to-face payments. The user stays in a familiar system; ClearCourse earns from software and from the money moving through it.
This is the distinction that makes the apparent jumble cohere. Harbour Assist manages marina customers, moorings, assets, invoices and communications. Computers for Flooring’s Carman follows a sale from order to delivery and installation. Rezcontrol runs hotel housekeeping, distribution, guest messages and payments. Motasoft’s Virtual Garage Manager holds workshop jobs alongside customer and vehicle records. Each is a system of record, close to revenue and awkward to remove.
That proximity is valuable only if the integration is good. A payment button bolted onto clumsy software creates another reconciliation problem. ClearCourse argues for a single support point and payment products presented under the software brand customers already trust. Its newer hospitality logic goes further: combine Rezcontrol for the property, TISSL for the restaurant, Giftpro for vouchers, Kurve for self-service ordering and ClearAccept underneath. That is less a bundle than an attempt to own the commercial journey from booking to pudding.
A customer left. The relationship did not.
The most useful ClearCourse case study starts with failure. LPM Restaurant and Bar had used the group’s TISSL hospitality system for years, but needed more functionality than the old product could supply. In 2018, it left. That is what failed first: the software stopped keeping pace with the customer.
TISSL did not win LPM back with a discount or a mournful account-manager email. It built a cloud product of its own, replacing a legacy platform it had been reselling. The new system connected front office, back office, stock and reservations and did not dictate the hardware. Meanwhile, LPM tested other products without finding a durable answer. Because the companies had kept a good relationship, LPM agreed to trial the rebuilt TISSL in Saudi Arabia. It then rolled the system into London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong.
“I found simplicity in the front and back office. Then, of course, there’s the support team, who are ready to help.”Despot Milivojevic, General Manager, LPM Abu Dhabi
What changed LPM’s mind was not nostalgia. The product had changed. TISSL controlled its own modern platform, could develop it around restaurant operations and was willing to adapt it for local requirements - including work for the US tax system ahead of a Miami deployment. The lesson is portable: keep talking to churned customers, but earn the return with a material product reset.
The acquisition brochure promises a home, not a shredder
ClearCourse’s second customer is the software founder considering a sale. Its pitch is deliberately warmer than the standard roll-up vocabulary. The company calls itself a permanent home. It says brands can retain their legacy, employees and expertise while using shared finance, people, legal, compliance, cybersecurity and product resources. Founders may continue operating the business, as leaders at Computers for Flooring and Motasoft have done.
The economic bargain is still an acquisition. ClearCourse looks for niche, cloud-oriented software with SME customers and a credible payment opportunity. It says a process can take roughly 60 to 90 days. Deal terms for its acquisitions are normally undisclosed, so there is no public shopping receipt for the portfolio or for recent purchases such as Davidson Richards, Rezcontrol, Motasoft and Kurve.
The pace has been quick from the beginning. A company retrospective says ClearCourse completed 14 acquisitions in its first 12 months while its central team grew from four people to 19. By its fourth birthday it reported more than 900 employees and almost 40 businesses. It bought four companies in 2024, three in 2025 and added Motasoft and Kurve with its pointOne brand in spring 2026. The current acquisition page uses the more conservative figure of 800-plus employees; LinkedIn places the group in the 501-to-1,000 band.
The market rewards depth - and punishes messy plumbing
ClearCourse sits among vertical-software consolidators such as Jonas Software, Volaris and The Access Group, and it meets broad business platforms such as Sage or Xplor inside individual sectors. Its defence is domain depth. A general ledger can serve nearly everyone. A marina system must understand berth contracts, boat owners, meter readings and seasonal availability. A flooring system has to connect odd-shaped inventory, measures, cuts, fitters and deposits. Knowledge like that accumulates slowly.
The group can now add another fashionable layer: AI. Its rationale is stronger than a generic chatbot pitch because these products hold structured records and sit in daily decisions. Motasoft’s acquisition announcement points to sector-specific AI for productivity and insight. The sensible opportunity is narrow - draft a customer reminder, spot a scheduling gap, surface an unusual sales pattern - and grounded in data the software already owns.
What another operator can copy
- Choose a workflow narrow enough that generic software handles it badly.
- Buy or build trust before adding a financial product to the same screen.
- Keep sector operators close to product decisions; their odd details are the moat.
- Measure cross-sell and payment adoption, not the raw number of logos acquired.
- Give a churned customer a reason to return: changed software, not changed wording.
The model has ordinary limits. It works best where software is mission-critical, recurring, close to a payment and used by a fragmented population of businesses. It works poorly where customers switch easily, transactions happen elsewhere, regulation blocks integration or every acquired product needs a complete rewrite. Central support can remove duplicate effort; too much centralisation can also flatten the expertise that justified buying the company.
There is execution risk in the sheer variety. A veterinary practice and a quick-service restaurant share a need to get paid, but little else. Integrations have to be maintained, data handled carefully and founder incentives kept aligned after the cheque clears. ClearCourse’s FAIR values - Future-proof, Approachability, Integrity and Responsibility - sound pleasant. Their test is whether a small customer still reaches a human who understands the difference between a tee time and a table turn.
Useful, deeply specific and close to the money
ClearCourse is compelling because it makes a grand strategy out of modest software. The product is not one gleaming platform. It is a garage booking, a donation form, a hotel room, a marina invoice and a card payment, each handled with less friction than yesterday. Aquiline supplies patient capital; the portfolio companies supply the vocabulary; ClearAccept supplies the connective economics.
That combination will not make every brand famous. Fame would almost be a category error. The win is quieter: a business owner spends less time reconciling systems, a founder gets liquidity without immediately watching the name disappear, and ClearCourse collects another stream of durable software and payment revenue. In this corner of technology, boring is not an insult. It is evidence that the work still needs doing.