Juno Search Partners has been acquired by an NYC-based insurance brokerage

Over its 12 years, talent acquisition and staffing firm Juno Search Partners‘ owners, Vicki Sack and Mikal Harden, say they’ve received more than a few bids to buy the business.

But the cofounders, who bootstrapped their business and grew it from about 15 employees to 85 in the past few years, never took an offer. Until now.

The cofounders told Technical.ly this week that Juno Search Partners was acquired by NFP, an insurance broker specializing in benefits, wealth management, property, casualty and retirement planning. With the purchase of Juno, NFP is adding a custom talent solution arm to its business.

“Adding Juno to the NFP family is significant for our work in the Philadelphia market and enables us to deliver even more value to client partners,” said Rich Krekstein, managing director of employee benefits for NFP.

Harden said her team always kept a good relationship with the NYC-based brokerage, which has a local offices in the Philly region.

“One of the things that made it attractive is that they respect what we do in search and staffing,” Sack said of NFP’s offer. “They see we’ve built a really strong company and they want to let us continue to do that.”

Sack and Harden will remain at the helm of Juno Search Partners, and their team won’t experience many changes outside operations, they said. They will also join NFP as senior vice presidents.

We didn't want to join just any company.

The cofounders said they see the purchase as an exciting way to harness the resources of a robust company with lots of other service offerings. In a statement, NFP’s Atlantic region president, Ethan Foxman, explained how the brokerage sees Juno fitting in to its 7,000-person global workforce and operation.

“The addition of Juno complements our existing resources and capabilities in the human capital solutions space, while also giving NFP a scalable search and talent solutions platform that we can grow nationally for the benefit of our clients and their workforce,” Foxman said.

In 2020, Sack and Harden also founded Juno Capital, a VC arm meant to fund businesses in the early, pre-seed or seed round of fundraising. The pair stressed that it was a way to “give back” to the Philly startup community, and it’s since taken local companies such as social media startup LifeBrand and HR tech platform Employee Cycle into its portfolio. Juno Capital is separate from Juno Search Partners and is not a part of this acquisition, the cofounders said.

Sack stressed that while the pair had entertained conversations over the years, no option felt right until they entered talks with NFP — “we didn’t want to join just any company,” she said. Harden agreed.

“Juno Search Partners has always been bootstrapped. We started this on a shoestring budget 12 years ago,” Harden said. “And when we think about the next chapter, it made a lot of sense to continue to scale and grow with the backing of a company like NFP.”