Flexware acquires North Carolina-based engineering services firm
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Fishers-based Flexware Innovation LLC, a fast-growing IT services provider, has acquired Castle Hill Technologies LLC, a North Carolina-based company that provides engineering services to the pharmaceutical industry.
Flexware declined to provide financial details of the transaction, which closed July 31.
Flexware, founded in 1996 and acquired by Tokyo-based Hitachi Ltd. in 2022, offers technology integration services to manufacturing clients in a variety of industries, including life sciences, automotive, chemicals, and consumer packaged goods, among others. Its services include helping companies digitize their operations and assuring that their production equipment and software systems can communicate with each other.
In addition to its Fishers headquarters, the company also has offices in Valparaiso and Cary, North Carolina. Pre-acquisition, Flexware had 218 employees—including 100 who have been hired within the past two years.
Of its 218 employees, about 100 report to the Fishers office and another 40 report to the Valparaiso office, with the others working from 24 other states, including North Carolina.
Castle Hill, which is based in the Raleigh suburb of Garner, also has an office in Attleborough Falls, Massachusetts. Founded in 1999, Castle Hill offers process automation engineering services to clients in the life sciences industry.
Castle Hill’s 23 employees are now part of Flexware, bringing Flexware’s post-acquisition headcount to 241.
The Castle Hill acquisition will help Flexware grow its business in this sector, said Flexware CEO Scott Whitlock.
“They are solely focused in the life science space, so their customers are all major pharmaceutical companies, which is our number-one industry segment and growing,” Whitlock said. “And it’s part of Hitachi’s strategy over the next few years in North America—the life sciences space.”
According to the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, that state’s life sciences industry employed 75,000 people as of 2023, and its Research Triangle Park ranks as North America’s largest research park.
The roots of the acquisition trace back to a chance encounter between the companies a few years ago, Whitlock said.
Castle Hill’s president is Robin Lowery, who was also the company’s primary owner before the Flexware acquisition. But in his LinkedIn profile, Lowery identifies himself only as a process automation engineer at the company, which led a Flexware recruiter to contact him to see if he’d like to join Flexware.
During that conversation, Lowery told the recruiter that he was more than an engineer at Castle Hill—he was the owner.
“When we found that out, we got really excited because, first of all, we loved the [LinkedIn profile] cloaking,” Whitlock said. “And second, we thought, ‘Well, we’ll just go get to know this guy.’”
So Whitlock and the recruiter flew to North Carolina to meet Whitlock and his second-in-command, sparking both a friendship and a business relationship that has grown over the past four years.
That relationship laid the groundwork for the recent acquisition, Whitlock said. “When we became a Hitachi Group company two years ago, in September 2022, and they told us, ‘We’d like you to grow through acquisition,’ they [Castle Hill] were one of our first ideas.”
Lowery remains at the helm of Castle Hill post-acquisition.