I’ve just sold our family firm Alertacall to a huge technology business. This is why.

It’s not every night that as the clock turns midnight, whilst drinking a cup of tea and eating a ginger biscuit (one of those large ones with the chocolate chips) you come to realise that you’ve just sold your business of 22 years to a £32 billion technology giant and that life is now going to be quite different.

But indeed, that is what happened to me on the 1st of July 2026. Where was the fanfare and the fireworks? There was simply a smile between my wife and I, a mutual shrug of the shoulders, a comment about it all being “an odd experience” and we went to sleep. The following morning it would have been easy to forget anything had really happened. 

But it had. Alertacall is now owned by tens of thousands of shareholders worldwide having been purchased by a unique publicly owned business with headquarters in Canada.

It marks an incredibly exciting new phase for Alertacall and everyone in it, and, to some extent, myself – as my relationship with it evolves and as I eventually begin to explore other passions. 

A truly unique business

To say Alertacall is an unusual business is an understatement; There really is no other company doing exactly what we do although it is true that we have pioneered several technologies and approaches that are now loosely being copied by other players in the PropTech and AgeTech space.

The growing interest in “I am okay” style services and other proactive approaches around contact with social housing customers (and other groups), mostly originated with us – and that is something we are very proud of.

Alertacall was originally funded with the proceeds of the sale of our tiny little first house and the sale of a previous venture – it was based around my invention of the I am okay button for my grandma Eveline, and a host of other innovations around proactively keeping in contact with older and vulnerable people. 

We resisted all but the most benign and supportive third-party shareholders and we’ve turned down countless opportunities to get involved with things that probably wouldn’t have been consistent with our values in the long term – on the basis that we have always wanted to do things right.

Pioneering new approaches

It may come as zero surprise that in its very early days we nearly “went under” on several occasions. Some other time I’ll write up the story about the remarkable day I told my wife that all was lost, that we were bankrupt and moving into a caravan – and how later that same day, we received our first proper order. An order for which I literally wept with relief and joy.

Being a pioneering company isn’t easy or straightforward because pioneers are forever removing arrows from their back, shot at them with words like “apathy”, “resistance to change” and “stale procurement processes” etched into their jagged sides. 

There’s been no model for us to copy. Our ideas have for the most part been our own, every line of code written from scratch and it’s been a huge effort over two decades to wake people up to this simple idea:

Having more proactive contact with older and vulnerable people, if done intelligently, can offer huge rewards for those people and the organisations that serve them.

Over the first eight or nine years of Alertacall, well over 100 people told me to my face how stupid or destined to fail these ideas were, including people from our own trade body. However, the worst of these insults were always from senior leaders in adult social services. Satisfyingly, those same organisations are now beginning to use these ideas in their communities. 

So thank you everyone – let’s raise a glass to incredible growth

So what follows is a sincere thank you to those people who intuitively understood the power of proactive contact with older people – from early on – and just maybe had a little faith in me too.

Thanks is especially needed for Neil Jurd OBE and Martin Cutbill, who served as a valuable sounding board when Alertacall was a mere handful of people, both of whom remained involved for the long haul.

Thanks also to Steve Hards, Tahir Idris, Wendy Goulding, Tony Collins, Rosa Parker, John Bloxsom, Robert Nettleton, Kelly Brown, Chris Hopkinson, Robin Watkinson, Shelley Bailey, Gill Healey, Paula Underwood, Martin Rayner, Peter Martins, John Martins, Dame Esther Rantzen, Sir Norman Lamb – and nowadays I am pleased to say many more.

Some of these people won’t even know the impact they had, and I’m not even in regular contact with anymore – but I thank them anyway. 

Quite incredibly and for the best part of twenty years Alertacall has grown at over 20% every single year (when averaged).

Alertacall has achieved this whilst shaping a sector, saving lives, reducing loneliness, supporting charities, planting trees – and creating careers for a whole stack of brilliant people, many of whom are still with us and thriving.

On reflection, I reckon that’s a pretty good outcome for a bloke that had an idea to help his gran. I hope she would think so.

If you’ve ever been part of the Alertacall team and like so many of us – have worked hard with passion and integrity, thank you so very much for helping us get here. If you’re one of our existing team members your role has never been so critical as it is right now, in shaping the next few decades of Alertacall.

So, why now?

There is a huge opportunity and we are positioning ourselves to take it.

The Regulator of Social Housing has for the past couple of years been encouraging (and in many respects mandating) that social landlords do more to communicate with their tenants, something we’ve been expert in for years with our Housing Proactive® service. Alongside Awaab’s Law our technologies simply make homes safer.

High profile and terrible stories about isolated people being left dead and undiscovered in their homes for long periods have raised interest in our proactive services like OkEachDay® for Housing.

And, of course digital switchover is forcing sheltered housing providers to revisit the kinds of technology they’ve got deployed on their housing schemes – by looking at solutions like our Beyond Warden Call® proposition. (By the way – we still don’t think most organisations are able to think very differently about these solutions, but they will in time – because they’ll have to). 

Our ideas also have huge applications more broadly in helping society deal with an aging population, because they can reduce demand on public services – and I have a hunch that this current government might just also be interested in such things.

So, we want to grow, we want to continue to innovate, and we want to take advantage of these shifts in our markets.

However, as a relatively small privately held business it’s easy for our cash to get tied up, for example in stock – and it can be a challenge taking some risks without a colossal balance sheet behind us, providing absolute certainty.

Well, Alertacall is now part of a technology group with a long term outlook and a £13Bn+ balance sheet. Neat, right?

We’ve had 100+ approaches

Alertacall has been approached, without exaggeration, every single week for several years – for some kind of merger or acquisition conversation. Most are speculative “BS” but over the years we’ve had great conversations with a number of quality parties.

Several times I personally have had the opportunity to “get rich” selling Alertacall – but until now, not one approach for an acquisition has made me feel confident that it would be in the best interests of our people, our products and most importantly the customers we serve. This has always been the priority.

Here’s the rub: almost every company in our space is owned by Private Equity.  And nearly all the other approaches to us have been made directly by Private Equity companies. 

Private Equity can be a very potent tool to grow businesses but it’s nearly always focused on relatively short-term financial return and Alertacall has never, ever, been about that. My goodness, some of the projects we’re getting across the line now are from conversations that were started more than five years ago.

I’ve always felt strongly that we needed to find a partner that understood that investing in long-term relationships is important. That our people need protection. That good business takes time. Also that our products must have a real impact in the world and be based around how older people really want to engage, not be designed by some engineer who’s never set foot in the home of a customer (or even worse, hasn’t changed their own thinking since the 1990s).

Yes, I am a big fan of building something with value, of pushing and driving things to be bigger and better. Even I can acknowledge the benefits of making money. But, what I’m not a fan of is being pressured to sell more and at all costs – because we’ve always wanted to balance profit with purpose. Business is business, sure – but there’s surely a right way to go about it.

First came Middleton Enterprises Ltd – a superb ‘patient’ investor

We got our first taste that there might be other investors who thought like us when Jeremy Middleton CBE, through his family office Middleton Enterprises Ltd, got involved in 2021.

Middleton Enterprises are “patient” investors who usually take minority positions in exceptional founder-led ventures and will often stay the entire course with that founder through to a company sale, whether that’s a few years or a decade in the future.

That year they bought small slice of Alertacall allowing me to start to think much more objectively about the future – and they went on to provide superb support and counsel.

If you are a founder, with an existing profitable business and growth potential, Middleton Enterprise Ltd should 100% be your first port of call for growth investment.

Thank you Jeremy and everyone else in your team, you have all been exemplary and in every respect.

Over the subsequent years we won prestigious national awards, started working with new prominent social landlords, brought new products to market and built an entirely new contact centre.

It wasn’t easy to pull any of that off, but then business rarely is.

We are now part of a Constellation

Amongst the ongoing approaches for acquisition was a company called Volaris Group, who themselves are part of Constellation Software, founded in 1995 and based in Toronto.

Constellation is the world’s first buy-and-hold acquirer of specialised software and technology businesses.

“Buy-and-hold” means they never ever sell their businesses and they invest in them and their people for the long term. They approached me and their pitch was entirely and utterly different to that from Private Equity or Private Equity-owned businesses because it was all about long term thinking.

It all felt much more sustainable. They were diligent and professional at reaching out to me time after time and making their case. Every part of their was pitch was solid, and the guy leading that pitch to us had experienced selling his own business – so he “got it”. 

Earlier this year we also undertook discussions with a whole host of other excellent businesses and investors who might be interested in acquiring us, to give us that platform for growth, and had offers from a great number of parties in that process.

Ultimately it was still Volaris Group and their pitch of investing in our existing teams, of allowing us to do what we already do so brilliantly, and of backing us – forever – that was the most compelling.

At midnight on the 1st of July 2026 Alertacall became entirely theirs and I couldn’t be more pleased for us or them. I no longer own even a single share in Alertacall.

Thank you to the Volaris Group team for being incredibly straightforward to deal with and congratulations on buying a lovely company that is packed with exceptional and passionate people.

What does this mean for everyone?

As part of a group that owns more than 1,300 businesses, this means my incredible Chief Operating Officer now has (in principle) 1,300 other COOs to share ideas with. My CTO, 1,300 other technical geniuses. Our superb Head of Client Relationships, likewise, 1,300 people just like him – to share ideas with, learn from, and mutually grow alongside. This incredible new networking and learning potential exists across many of our roles.

We are also now in a position to invest more in some of the areas that are going to be key to our clients in the coming years, and potentially access other technologies from across the entire group.

Importantly, the group we’ve become part of have already demonstrated a commitment to professional development and wanting our teams to keep doing what they already do so very well.

For our clients this really is very much business as usual, with the knowledge that Alertacall is more secure than ever before.

For our wider team members, it means more security and opportunity than ever before. 

What does it mean for yours truly?

So what does this mean for me? Well in the short to medium term I’m still very much the Chief Executive of Alertacall.

Remember that Alertacall was founded because of something which happened to my own grandmother so I’m always going to be batting for it – so long as it keeps true to its values and ideals.

It’s now a matter of dignity and honour that I do what I can to see the company, its people, the products, the services, and all of our many clients and customers go on to thrive.

Our inventions do a huge amount of social good, it’s imperative that I still help get them in to the hands of people.

It is however also utterly imperative in any organisation that leadership, particularly that of the CEO, is refreshed from time to time to take advantage of new ideas, approaches and energy. And, especially so after 22 years!

Could YOU make an incredible CEO for Alertacall?

That means it’s also exactly the right time for Alertacall to explore new leadership and so over the coming months or years, I’ll be searching for my successor.  Could this be you or someone you know?

Do you want to CEO a multi-award-winning technology company that does social good for the next five years or more? (And work with the most superb group of people!).

Contact me if you think you’ve got what it takes and feel free to forward this article in your network.

My future projects

Once this successor is found, my time will be spent mentoring and coaching them and working closely with the rest of our senior leadership team to help them thrive. In time – I will move to an advisory, mentorship and ambassadorial role. 

Over this period I will also begin to take a few steps towards other projects including:

• inspiring policymakers with new ideas to support social outcomes
• youth mentorship taken up a notch – with more structure
• some angel investing in new technology startups
• a book of short stories to finish writing (and take on tour)
• a tourist attraction I want to build based on a novel concept
• a couple more inventions for older people (just maybe!)

 

I just hope I’ve got enough time left on this earth to give justice to some of these newer endeavours.

So much to do, so little time!

And of course, I want to pursue my greatest passion of all which is spending quality time with passionate and positive people and learning new things. 

Thank you all so much

Please may I ask for your ongoing support for Alertacall, its wonderful people, and everything it does going forward?

I know it’s been posted many times before, but here is a photograph of my grandmother Eveline, Alertacall’s very first customer.

And, I really must say thank you to my (long suffering) wife – who went on to make nearly 50,000 calls to older people and who worked with me 365 days a year, for months on end in those early days – without a single day off – and with a child at her ankles.

Thank you also to that very same child for putting up with all my talk of Alertacall and for so many years. A lover of adventure of whom I am very proud – she hasn’t known anything else other than her dad running and talking about Alertacall – she was a tiny baby on the day we launched on a Yorkshire Television evening news programme.

For a much more formal Press Release about the acquisition click here.

Written on the 12th of August 2026, at 6pm, on a remote hillside, an hour north-east of Madrid, sheltered in the shade of a tree and awaiting the total solar eclipse. For us at least, this truly is a year of celestial alignments.

The views posted in this article are those of James Batchelor solely and do not necessarily reflect those of Alertacall Ltd or Volaris Group, or Constellation Software.