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Solicitor sells HR software company to PE-backed healthcare business

Curtis: Perfect platform

A solicitor who sold his stake in the law firm he co-founded to focus on a HR software company set up at the same time has now sold the IT business.

Sheffield-based myhrtoolkit [1] has been bought by private equity-backed healthcare specialist Agilio Software.

Myhrtoolkit is a cloud-based subscription HR platform used by over 1,250 SME customers. It works with a number of employment lawyers, who use the software as part of their offering to businesses, as well as HR consultants.

John Curtis, who is joining Agilio’s management team as HR strategy director, set up what was to become myhrtoolkit with Trevor Ironmonger in Sheffield in 2005, at the same time as they set up law firm Ironmonger Curtis, both aimed at SMEs.

As we reported in late 2018 [2], he took control of myhrtoolkit after a management buy-out with operations manager Bob Teasdale and technical director Kit Barker, leaving Mr Curtis, the managing director, with overall control.

Neil Laycock, chief operating officer of Agilio Group, said: “The addition of myhrtoolkit represents our ongoing ambition to provide intuitive SaaS based HR services to our customers. The team at myhrtoolkit will also help us configure these services specifically for our core healthcare markets and bring deep expertise in HR to the group.”

Mr Curtis said: “Agilio is the perfect platform for the next stage of innovative solutions we had planned at myhrtoolkit.”

Mr Teasdale will now lead the myhrtoolkit business within the Agilio Group.

August Equity initially invested in Agilio with the acquisition in 2019 of CODE – a leading provider of compliance and HR software into the dental market – and last June added Isopharm, a provider of both online CPD into the dental market and validation/testing software into a broad range of healthcare providers.

August partner Christian Dubé said: “The combination of cloud-based compliance, HR and CPD training modules has been a huge success for Agilio enabling best-in-class management of dental clinicians and practices of all sizes.

“MyHRtoolkit provides the group with an enhanced roster of services that will enable Agilio’s reach to expand beyond dentistry.”