We're specific about the companies we acquire — not because we're picky, but because we know where we add value and where we don't. If your company checks most of the boxes below, we'd like to hear from you.
Exceptions exist — we've made them before and will again. But this is the shape of most of the companies we acquire.
Most of the CEOs we meet fit one of these three profiles. None of them is better or worse — they just need different things from an acquirer. We've structured deals for all three.
You still love running the company. You want a partner with capital, pattern-matching, and back-office support so you can focus on product and customers. You'll stay in the CEO seat and take a second bite at a much larger valuation in five to ten years.
You've been running this company for 15–25 years. You're proud of what you built, but the next decade of CEO grind is someone else's problem. You want a clean sale, a dignified exit path, and a buyer who won't tear apart the team and customers who stuck by you.
The product works. The customers are loyal. But the tech stack is aging, the GTM motion hasn't been rebuilt in a decade, and the company needs investment you don't have the risk appetite to fund yourself. You'd rather take some chips off the table and let someone else modernize.
Horizontal software competes with giants. Vertical software competes with the next five companies at the industry conference. The economics of the two are almost nothing alike.
Vertical software is sticky because it's embedded in how the customer runs their business. Replacing it is painful and rarely worth it.
A specialty-workflow SaaS for a $2B industry can price against the value it delivers, not against 50 undifferentiated competitors.
A well-run vertical software product can serve the same industry for 20+ years. New entrants are rare, and incumbents compound.
We focus on verticals where the customer's business runs on the software — EHRs for specialty care, scheduling for field service, permitting for local government, compliance for regulated industries, logistics for mid-market distributors. When the software is load-bearing, everything about owning the business gets better.
Some of the best vertical software companies in North America were built by founders who put customers first and stayed loyal to their teams — quietly, over a decade or more, in cities the typical strategic acquirer doesn't think to visit. We do.
A Waverock company already operates here.
We look everywhere in the US and Canada, but the companies that fit best are usually built by founders who measure success in customers served and people retained — not in funding rounds raised. If yours has been compounding quietly off the standard venture flight path, that's a feature, not a bug.
If you're pre-revenue, pre-product, or still figuring out what the business is, we're not the right home. Venture is. Come find us in three years.
Great consulting businesses exist; we're not the buyer for them. We need product to be the center of gravity and recurring revenue to be the majority of the mix.
B2C has a different set of dynamics — ad funnels, churn, brand — than B2B vertical software. We don't pretend to know it well enough to be helpful.
CRM, project management, marketing automation, dev tools — if your product sits in a category with thousands of direct competitors and no industry-specific moat, we're probably not a fit.
Litigation, broken tech stacks, customer concentration north of 40%, unresolved founder disputes — we can help with a lot, but not with everything. If the company needs a turnaround before it needs a home, turnaround specialists are the better fit.
A 30-minute confidential conversation with Mike. No NDAs at this stage, no diligence, no commitment. If it's a fit on both sides, we move from there.