Software & Data
Software is the most actively traded sector in technology, and the most unevenly priced. Two companies with the same revenue now sell for very different numbers, and the gap between them is widening rather than closing.
We advise lower mid-market vertical SaaS and B2B software companies, data and analytics businesses, and AI-enabled companies where the relevant buyer universe extends across the Atlantic.
What Buyers Are Paying For
Revenue quality, not revenue.
Buyers do not accept an ARR figure; they rebuild it. Contracted, renewing subscription revenue is underwritten differently from implementation fees, usage upside and project work. Retention is read gross as well as net, because expansion in a handful of accounts can conceal churn across the rest.
Growth and margin together.
Some businesses here sell software; others sell the data the software produces. Both are underwritten against the same question — what could an acquirer not reproduce. For a software business the answer is usually workflow embedding and switching cost. For a data business it is provenance and rights: how the dataset was acquired, whether the contracts confirm the company owns what its own product generates, and whether a competitor could simply regenerate it. AI has raised the price of genuinely scarce data and collapsed the price of the rest.
AI that shows up in the numbers.
Almost every software company now presents an AI story, and buyers have responded by testing it rather than listening to it. Positioning that survives that test is paid for. Positioning that does not is worse than silence.
Your best buyer may not be in your sector
Concentration and mix
Customer concentration and a heavy services mix are the two most common discounts in this sector — and two of the most addressable before a process. Each is priced twice: once in the multiple, and again in what is held back, deferred or made contingent.
Who is Buying
The buyer universe spans strategic software platforms, data and information businesses buying coverage rather than capability, private-equity platforms and the companies they already own, specialist technology investors, and serial acquirers that buy to hold. Financial buyers and their platforms now account for the majority of software transactions by number; strategic acquirers remain decisive where the acquisition closes a capability gap.
That universe is genuinely transatlantic — more so here than in any other sector we cover. North American acquirers are the single largest source of buyers for European software companies by number of transactions, and capital moves in the other direction too. In software, a national process is a structurally incomplete one.
We track who is acquiring, what they are underwriting and where individual companies fit. That knowledge is the difference between a mailing list and a process.
If you have been approached
An inbound approach tells you that your company fits an acquisition thesis. It does not tell you that the caller is the best buyer; or that their offer is the market.
One offer is not a market.