$53M investment for fast-growing LiquidHub

When the dot.com boom crashed in 2001 and the easy money dried up, Guyana native Jonathan Brassington and two colleagues quit their venture capital-backed Philadelphia firm and set up their own small company: LiquidHub.

They designed it to be self-funding - with cash from clients, not bets from investors - and went to work upgrading Internet services for some of the region's biggest companies.

Today, LiquidHub is big enough, profitable enough, and growing fast enough to welcome investment from around the world.

On Tuesday, it confirmed a $53 million investment led by ChrysCapital, a multinational firm that has invested more than $2 billion for Ivy League universities and other clients since 1999.

With 1,400 employees - half in the U.S., at its Wayne headquarters and in Boston and San Francisco satellite offices, the rest in India - and a client list including Vanguard Group, SEI Corp., Novartis, Independence Blue Cross, Subaru and Comcast, among others, Brassington's company doubled annual sales in the last three years, to $125 million.

LiquidHub's engineers and programmers work side by side with clients' information tech workers. The goal is to adapt computer systems, so companies can assemble and analyze data for employees and customers, through smartphones and iPads and remote "cloud" servers.

Along with rival "digital integrators" such as Sapient, Accenture Digital and Globant, LiquidHub doesn't replace big business software systems built by such providers as SAP, Microsoft or IBM, but adapts them into handheld devices and other everyday applications.

LiquidHub's ability to hook companies into popular and "disruptive" technologies makes it a promising platform for global growth, ChrysCapital managing director Sanjay Kukreja said in a statement.

"We're excited. We look at ourselves as helping to develop a vibrant technology economy in Philadelphia. We have a lot of opportunities ahead of us," said Brassington, 39, on Tuesday, while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. He added that he and his family wanted "to experience the Caribbean culture I grew up with."

His road from Guyana to Pennsylvania was traced by his father's sister, a nun in the order of the Sisters of Mercy, who recommended Brassington to her Catholic order's college, Misericordia University in Dallas, Pa.

After finishing grad school at Penn, he went to work at the seminal digital advisory firm Broadreach Consulting from 1995-2001, then joined colleagues Robert Kelley and Leighton Yohannan to start LiquidHub.

"We never make a technology move without getting his views," says Richard Vague, the Center City-based marketing mogul who has recruited Brassington into his venture fund, Gabriel Investments. Vague says Brassington and his wife, a cancer survivor, in turn recruited Vague to underwrite cancer research at Penn.

"Jonathan's brilliant, and very positive. He started this in a tough time, and his financial customers spent [the late 2000s] knee deep in tough times, but LiquidHub grew through it," said Michael DiPiano, whose Radnor-based firm, NewSpring Capital, led an earlier $20 million investment in the firm in 2007, and has more than doubled its money as LiquidHub grew.

"Also, he's a hell of an Eagles fan," DiPiano added. Brent Celek, the Eagles tight end and an aspiring restaurateur (Prime Stache) and men's accessories supplier, has been an informal entrepreneur-in-residence at LiquidHub, while also helping to feed Brassington's football appetite.

Football has been a switch for a guy who started out a cricket fanatic in his homeland, notes Professor Munir Mandviwalla, head of Temple University's Institute for Business and Information Technology. But sports fanaticism is consistent with the drive and competitive energy Brassington pours into LiquidHub, Mandviwalla added.

"He gets the digital conversions that we are all facing - this notion that we are all moving toward an integrated future where digital media, analytics, branding, and the block-and-tackle of running basic services like online payroll, are all converging," Mandviwalla explained. "What they've done better than most firms is stepping into the next big thing."