Hawkins: Agilence sold to PE 18 months ago, pursuing M&A for expansion
Russ Hawkins · The $30m ARR Battle: How 1 VC Forced a 5x Exit When Restaurant SaaS CEO Wanted to Keep Building · Sep 4, 2023 · at 7:59
Agilence CEO Russ Hawkins discusses the company's private equity sale and subsequent M&A strategy for geographical expansion.
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“We sold the company to a private equity firm about 18 months ago, and one of the things that they've enabled is potential acquisitions, and so I'm looking at a couple of acquisitions right now that would give us a structural platform to bring our solution to other geographies.”
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More from Russ Hawkins
Hawkins: Arrowroot Capital forced an unwanted exit on Agilence
“All I know is that they forced our hand and it was not not what we wanted to do.”
Hawkins: Agilence sold under 5x ARR but deserved an 8x multiple
“We sold sub five and I think we should have gotten more like eight.”
Hawkins: Conflicting venture fund timelines create major exit alignment issues
“It's a problem from my perspective with the, with you know, multiple venture investors that have, you know, conflicting objectives within their own funds.”
Hawkins: 80% of Agilence customers use the platform for operational analytics
“Originally, the use cases were all around loss prevention, but now 80% of my customers use it for operational analytics merchandising, marketing, even the finance organizations use it for a variety of things.”
Hawkins: Agilence averages $125k ACV across hundreds of US customers
“Today we have a couple of hundred customers, more than a couple of hundred customers across those three groups in, in the U S on average, they pay us around 125,000 a year, but we have some that are close to a million and some that are smaller.”