LiquidHub took the problem nobody wanted.

Vanguard was a formidable first customer for a young consultancy. Asked in July 2026 how LiquidHub won the investment company’s business, co-founder Jonathan Brassington recalled a vendor pitch with an unusual request: give us the hardest problem nobody else wanted. LiquidHub took the assignment and earned trust. The interviewer made it sound easy. Brassington supplied the correction: “It took a long time.”

That first assignment offers a useful way into a company usually described with phrases like digital transformation. LiquidHub sold expertise to businesses with complicated systems and demanding customers. Its opportunity lay in the distance between what those customers wanted to do and what the technology allowed.

01 Cash before capital

The company’s beginnings followed a collapse in confidence. In 2001, after the dot-com boom broke, Brassington and colleagues Robert Kelley and Leighton Yohannan left Broadreach Consulting and started LiquidHub. They built it around revenue from clients. Having seen the funding environment turn, they wanted a business that could pay its way.

This helps explain the sequence that followed. First came services people would buy. Outside equity arrived later: a reported $20 million in 2007, then a $53 million transaction led by ChrysCapital in March 2014. The latter included an existing investor’s exit, so the headline amount should not be mistaken for a fresh operating budget.

By 2014, contemporary reporting put annual sales at $125 million and the workforce at 1,400, split roughly between the United States and India. Capital could now support a company with customers, a delivery operation and something specific to expand.

02 The trouble between the screens

LiquidHub began with enterprise architecture advisory work. Customer demand pulled it toward digital integration and, increasingly, customer engagement. That shift mattered. A company could have powerful internal software and still make an ordinary interaction painfully awkward.

Consider the general problem: a customer starts on a website, switches to a phone and eventually calls for help. Marketing, sales and service may each see a different fragment. Improving that experience requires decisions about interfaces, data and the systems behind them. The visible screen is only part of the job.

LiquidHub’s work covered strategy, application development, cloud and mobile services, analytics and experience design. It also sometimes managed the technology it helped build. Buyers were enterprises paying for specialist work and delivery capacity. A reusable framework could help, but the commercial relationship depended on solving the client’s particular problem.

Its market included Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys and other consultancies. LiquidHub’s proposition combined creative work with the engineering needed to make it usable, with particular experience in healthcare and financial services. Its acquisition choices made that combination increasingly concrete.

For a prospective buyer, the attraction was having research, design and implementation within the same engagement. The scope still needed discipline. Our reading of the model suggests a practical buying question: which customer task is difficult today, and which underlying systems prevent it from becoming easier? That gives a consulting brief something observable to address.

03 Buy the missing skills

In October 2014, LiquidHub acquired Foundry9, a digital agency offering marketing, design, strategy and analytics. The announcement explicitly addressed the divide between chief marketing officers and chief information officers. A campaign and the technology serving it would come from a more closely connected team.

Then came concentrated investment in Salesforce expertise. ClosedWon and Harvest Solutions joined in January 2015; Redkite followed in March. These were businesses that helped clients implement a platform they already used or wanted to adopt. LiquidHub was buying experienced practitioners and customer relationships.

Electronic Ink added another perspective in August 2016: cognitive scientists, designers and industrial engineers who studied how people actually used technology. In December, Annik brought data management, market research and analytics, alongside a wider international footprint. The sequence reads like a list of skills required to deliver an entire engagement.

By the acquisition announcement in 2018, Capgemini also described proprietary platforms. One coordinated specialty pharmaceutical interactions involving patients, providers and channel partners. Another supported secure digital customer acquisition in regulated industries. These gave the services business reusable components for recurring industry problems.

04 A company made of people

Buying capabilities creates a second assignment: getting their owners to work together. Brassington described internal contests and a meritocratic culture. One competition produced Panorama, a mobile content-delivery framework. Shared charitable activities also brought together employees otherwise distributed across client work.

An AIS/Temple University case study documented a more physical experiment. LiquidHub redesigned its offices for openness, with the CEO’s desk out alongside everybody else’s. Conversations and disagreements became more visible. Some employees refined how they gave feedback; others who did not accept the culture left.

“Meritocracy is a core principle of the business.”

Jonathan Brassington · 2014

There is a useful complication here. Openness can improve access while also creating friction. A consultancy’s design, data and engineering skills reside in people who must stay, collaborate and deliver. Adding names to an acquisition list cannot settle those questions.

The broader inference is that the cost of this model extends beyond acquiring companies. Teams need time to combine methods, preserve client knowledge and agree on responsibilities. Without that work, a customer can still encounter the same handoffs, even when every supplier now shares a corporate owner.

05 The weekend everything connected

In February 2018, Brassington was at the Super Bowl with clients, cheering for the Philadelphia Eagles while keeping the sale confidential. Capgemini announced the acquisition just after the game. Its first-half financial report confirms completion in March.

For Capgemini, LiquidHub strengthened digital consulting in North America. For LiquidHub, the buyer offered global reach and a broader set of services to bring to clients. The business that had assembled specialists around customer problems became part of a much larger delivery organization.

The practical lesson starts with Vanguard: find a difficult, bounded problem and earn the right to do more. Then add capabilities that answer the customer’s next need. That approach depends on credible expertise and patient delivery. A straightforward website brief may need a small team; a sprawling integration program needs coordination to justify its cost. LiquidHub’s history is most useful when it makes that distinction visible.