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.
