Acora hits £100M revenue run rate with HANDD acquisition

What's the deal? Acora, a UK-based business technology services firm backed by private equity firm LDC, has acquired HANDD Business Solutions, a specialist in secure data transfer, automation, and orchestration. The deal brings HANDD's operations in the UK, Malaysia, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong into Acora's fold — pushing the combined group to roughly £100M in annualised run-rate revenue for 2026.

HANDD's co-founders, Ian Davin and Anthony Hodges, will stay on in senior roles. The combined team in Malaysia will number nearly 100 staff.

Why now? Acora chief executive David Rabson said the deal was completed off-market and at pace — a pattern for how it approaches M&A. HANDD, with nearly 20 years of experience and a blue-chip client list, gives Acora deeper data capabilities at a time when secure data transfer, cloud-native integrations, and agentic AI are in high demand across enterprises.

For HANDD, joining a larger group provides what co-founder Ian Davin called "additional firepower" to better serve its existing customer base.

What could go wrong? Integration is the perennial risk with acquisitions of this kind. Merging a niche, globally distributed specialist into a larger managed services operation can create friction — culturally, technically, and operationally. Retaining HANDD's talent and client relationships through the transition will be critical.

The signal: The deal reflects a broader trend in IT services: mid-market firms bulking up through acquisition to offer end-to-end capabilities across IT, cybersecurity, and data. As enterprises demand fewer, more capable vendors, firms like Acora are racing to build multi-disciplinary platforms that span managed services, security, and AI — and increasingly, they're doing it across multiple geographies at once.

Read more: handd.co.uk