Gaurav Bhasin
Jul 25, 20231 min
At Allied Advisers, we have advised bootstrapped companies on growth financing from leading PE firms and exits to Fortune 50 companies. While institutional backed companies have a natural cadence of raising rounds of private capital every 12 to 24 months, followed by an eventual exit via M&A or IPO, bootstrapped companies don’t have such deal experience and can hence be flat footed when it comes to executing a funding round or exit process.
Some notable companies which were bootstrapped for a long period of time prior to hitting escape velocity with some eventually transacting include Atlassian, Backblaze, Mailchimp, Netcore, Qualtrics, Zapier, Zoho etc.
This article is intended as a primer for bootstrapped companies to be transaction ready when they are approached by strategic buyers or have achieved such a scale that PE firms start courting them for growth financing and or majority buyouts.