Hayley Roberts

Hayley Roberts is founder and chief executive of Distology, a Stockport-based distributor of cybersecurity technology that marked the end of its 10th year in December 2025. On 1 September 2026 she swapped one private equity backer for a bigger one: Foresight Group, a FTSE 250 investment manager, bought Distology from NorthEdge, which had backed the business since February 2021.

A bigger backer and a bigger bet

Distology made about £80m of revenue in its 2026 financial year, around £60m of it in the UK, and Roberts expects £100m in the 2027 financial year, as reported by IT Channel Oxygen. NorthEdge says the business grew EBITDA at a compound annual rate of 48% over the two years to FY26. Headcount more than doubled to 53 under NorthEdge’s ownership, according to the same Oxygen interview.

The usual route for a cyber value-added distributor (VAD) is to grow for a few years and then sell to a larger distributor. Roberts has chosen to keep going, and has said she would feel she had failed everybody if the brand died in a sale. “It’s pretty frickin’ ballsy to go and get more investment to back a journey and keep going,” she told IT Channel Oxygen. In Distology’s own announcement she said the deal “gives us greater opportunity to pursue strategic acquisitions”. Germany is the first target. Distology already has operations there and in the Netherlands, and its only acquisition to date is Squareball, a German services firm it bought in 2022.

Vendors from a higher tier

The vendor list has moved upmarket. In January 2026 Distology signed Tenable, the Nasdaq-listed exposure management vendor, a deal VETTDD covered in February. Roberts said at the time: “Signing a vendor like Tenable is a huge milestone for us as a business.” She added that Distology had first been introduced to Tenable a decade earlier. In April it signed Snyk, the application and AI security vendor, for the UK, DACH and Benelux markets.

Roberts told IT Channel Oxygen that Distology had signed more than double its usual number of vendors in the past 12 months, including Flare, Snyk and Horizon3.ai alongside Tenable. She says TD Synnex, Exclusive Networks and Infinigate are losing vendors to Distology.

Why it matters to the channel

Emerging cyber vendors reach UK resellers through a small number of broadline and specialist distributors. A UK-founded VAD with fresh private equity money and a plan to buy in Germany gives those vendors another route into Northern Europe. It also gives resellers a distributor that competes on technical depth and early access to new vendors rather than on scale and credit lines.

Roberts has built Distology over a decade into an £80m cyber distributor with Tenable and Snyk on its vendor list, and has lined up the backing to take it into Germany.