TIVIT

**The person behind it had an unusual previous career.** Luiz Mattar spent ten years as a professional tennis player before going into business. His first venture as an investor was a combined brewery and nightclub. Shortly after, with four partners and R$150,000, he started Telefutura - a call centre and business process outsourcing company - which sold 20% to Votorantim Novos Negócios in 2001, a transaction that mattered less for the money than for the credibility it bought with financial-sector clients.

The idea Mattar kept pressing was a **one stop shop**: a customer able to buy every kind of IT service from a single supplier rather than assembling one from many. Votorantim eventually concluded it owned the pieces to build that, and did - which is why TIVIT exists as a merger rather than a founding. Telefutura itself was folded in during 2007.

**The listing is a detail worth keeping.** TIVIT went public on BM&FBovespa's Novo Mercado in September 2009 at R$15 a share, raising over R$660M, after two earlier attempts had been abandoned because of market conditions. At the time it was **the only IT services company listed on the Brazilian exchange** - the other technology listings were hardware makers like Positivo, Itautec and Bematech, or software, like Totvs. A services business is harder to explain to public markets than a factory, and for a while nobody else tried.

It did not stay listed long. In 2010 Apax Partners bought control, paying a premium of twenty to thirty per cent over a market capitalisation of about R$1.47B, and it was **Apax's first investment in Brazil**. Under that ownership the company expanded across the region, acquiring Synapsis in 2014 and reaching ten Latin American countries.

What followed is the ordinary arc of a services business in this period: a cloud platform in 2016, a digital solutions arm, an innovation unit, a cybersecurity practice that reported around ninety per cent growth in 2023, a separation of the data centre business under the Takoda name, and an acquisition by the Italian group Almaviva.

**Read against the Stefanini entry, the two are opposite constructions of the same thing.** Stefanini began with one man teaching classes in a spare room and grew outward for decades. TIVIT began fully formed, with two thousand employees and a client list, because a holding company decided the market wanted something and merged its way to it. **Both are large Brazilian technology services firms; neither could have been built the other's way.** One needed patience and one needed capital, and the interesting question is which model travels better - Stefanini went abroad on its own account, while TIVIT's regional expansion arrived with private equity attached.