5 Boring SaaS Exits That Made Founders £100M+ in the Last 18 Months

You won't see these on TechCrunch. They're not AI. They're not consumer. They don't have a category-defining brand or a TED talk founder.

What they do have: 80%+ recurring revenue, 110-130% net revenue retention, single-digit churn, EBITDA margins north of 30%, and dull-as-ditchwater customers (compliance officers, finance teams, fleet managers, contractors) who've been paying the same monthly invoice for seven years.

And they're the ones being acquired right now, often in the £100m–£500m range, often by private equity buyers who built their thesis around exactly this profile.

The current market data backs the pattern. Private SaaS exit multiples in 2025 sat at a median around 3.8x revenue, up from 2.9x in 2024. But within that median, bootstrapped vertical SaaS regularly clears 5x and the top quartile of profitable vertical players push past 7x. The premium isn't for growth at all costs. It's for predictable cash and defensible niches.

Here are five deals from the last 18 months that illustrate the pattern, and what each founder did to land in front of the right buyer at the right time. Names of the businesses range from well-documented public deals to anonymised case studies (clearly marked) drawn from our advisory work and the M&A archive. The numbers, in every case, are the kind of numbers that change a founder's life.

1. The Citation Group: a £1bn+ recap of compliance SaaS

In December 2024, Hg announced a recapitalisation of The Citation Group, a UK-headquartered tech-enabled compliance and certification platform serving SMEs across HR, health & safety and quality assurance. Hg had originally taken the business private alongside KKR in 2020. The 2024 recap took it past the £1 billion enterprise value mark.

What makes Citation interesting is what it isn't. It isn't glamorous. It isn't AI-native. It sells templates, helplines and software to small businesses that need to stay legal. Customers stay for an average tenure measured in years rather than months. The product is sticky for the most boring possible reason: switching is more painful than paying.

What Citation got right, and what founders should learn:

• Built a multi-vertical platform (HR, H&S, ISO certification) that becomes more valuable to each customer as they adopt more modules. NRR climbs without acquisition cost.
• Maintained a service component (advice line) that competitors couldn't replicate with software alone, justifying premium pricing.
• Bought up smaller vertical players for years, turning each acquisition into a cross-sell engine to the existing base.
• Stayed boring. The investor pitch wasn't about disruption. It was about churn rate, gross margin and predictability.

The lesson: PE buyers will pay multi-billion valuations for compliance and back-office SaaS that nobody outside the customer base has heard of, as long as the cash conversion is unimpeachable.

2. Tessian: the cybersecurity tuck-in (lessons from a softer exit)

Not every “boring” SaaS exit is a £100M+ founder windfall. Some teach you what happens when product-market fit doesn't scale to the valuation. Tessian, a London-based AI-driven email security business that raised around $128 million from investors including Accel, Sequoia and Balderton at a peak valuation of roughly $500 million, was acquired by US-listed Proofpoint in late 2023.

The deal value wasn't disclosed but is widely understood by people close to the situation to have been below the last private round. Late-stage VC investors took a haircut. Earlier investors and founders did better, but it wasn't the exit the cap table had modelled.

Tessian is in this list as a counterpoint. It's a reminder that “boring SaaS” is not a synonym for “sleepy SaaS.” The boring exits that pay are the ones with disciplined unit economics and a route to profitability built into the plan. The boring exits that don't pay are the ones that look like vertical SaaS in the deck but were actually run as a growth-stage VC asset.

What founders should learn:

• If you're going to be acquired by a strategic, the price is set by what the buyer can do with you, not what your last round implied.
• Late-stage capital raised at a high price is a tax on your future exit. Take less, dilute less, control the cap table.
• Profitability is optionality. Tessian's issue wasn't product, it was that the cash burn forced a sale at a moment of weakness.

3. Vertical SaaS in property and construction: the platform play

One of the largest waves of UK SaaS M&A in 2024-25 didn't hit headlines because it happened across 30 separate transactions to 4-5 acquirers. Companies like The Access Group, IRIS Software, Visma and Volaris have spent the last 18 months acquiring small vertical SaaS players in PropTech, ConTech, fieldwork management and trade-specific accounting tools.

A typical deal in this category looks like this: a UK-based, founder-owned, bootstrapped business with £4-12 million ARR, 30-40% EBITDA margins, 90%+ recurring revenue, sold for 4-7x ARR depending on growth and retention. That's a £20-80 million enterprise value for a business that started as a side project.

The founders walking away with serious money in this category share four things:

• Deep vertical specialisation (one industry, one persona, one painful workflow), not horizontal positioning.
• A real moat in industry knowledge, not just code. They knew the difference between a quantity surveyor and a project surveyor when their competitors didn't.
• Operational discipline: clean books, low founder dependency, ARR system that any auditor can stand up.
• A direct relationship with two or three plausible strategic buyers, established years before the deal. By the time they ran a process, the buyers had already met them.

The lesson: if you run a vertical SaaS business doing £3 million+ of recurring revenue, the buyer pool is significantly larger than you think. The discipline is to make yourself easy to buy: clean numbers, predictable retention, and an obvious place in someone's acquisition strategy.

4. The fleet management platform (anonymised case study)

This is a deal we worked on the periphery of in 2024. A UK-based fleet management SaaS business, founded in 2011, bootstrapped to £8 million ARR, sold to a US-listed acquirer in mid-2024. Headline value, low nine figures. Founder rolled 20% equity into the new structure and is staying for 36 months.

What was special about this business wasn't the technology. The product was, by their own admission, “a fork of an open-source telematics tool wrapped in a UI customers actually liked.”

What was special was the customer base. Local councils. Waste management contractors. Logistics operators with 200-2000 vehicles. The kind of customer that does an annual procurement review on a four-year cycle, signs a three-year contract, and never churns unless something catastrophic happens.

The founder did three things explicitly aimed at being acquirable:

• Built a CRO (customer renewal officer) function five years before sale, owned by someone other than the founder. By the time the deal happened, retention was running on rails without the founder in the room.
• Standardised contracts. No bespoke customer commercials, no special pricing, no “we'll figure it out next year.” Every customer was on a version of the same MSA. Diligence took weeks rather than months.
• Got audited from year three. Annual statutory audits, even when not legally required, gave the buyer confidence the numbers were clean and saved 30%+ off legal fees in the deal itself.

The lesson: prepare to be bought from year three, not year nine. Most of the work that drives a premium multiple takes years to embed.

5. The legal-tech bolt-on (anonymised case study)

Legal-tech is the unsexy cousin of fintech, and one of the most acquisitive corners of UK SaaS. In late 2024 a privately held legal practice management platform, with £6 million ARR and ~35% EBITDA margins, was acquired by a strategic for an enterprise value reportedly around £45 million. The founder had been running the business for 14 years.

The closing multiple was 7.5x EBITDA, well above the median for software businesses of that size. Why? Three reasons.

First, the customer profile. 1,800 small UK law firms, average tenure 6.4 years, single-digit logo churn. To a strategic that already sold complementary tools (document management, e-signature, billing) into UK law firms, this customer base alone was worth more than the technology. Each one was a cross-sell opportunity.

Second, the founder transition plan. Two years before the sale, the founder hired a managing director with a clear brief: run the business as if you'll be the one in front of the buyer in 18 months. By the time the process ran, the MD owned every customer relationship, every operational decision, and every key hire. The buyer didn't need to retain the founder for the deal to work.

Third, the data room. When the LOI was signed, the data room was 90% ready. Three years of audited accounts, every customer contract by version, an exhaustive cohort analysis showing NRR by intake year, a documented product roadmap with stack-ranked priorities, and a properly catalogued IP register. The buyer's diligence team ran the process in seven weeks instead of the usual four months. Process speed is a soft factor that materially affects price.

The lesson: when the diligence is easy, the buyer's confidence climbs and so does the price. The data room work is unglamorous. It is also the highest leverage thing you can do in the year before a sale.

The pattern in one paragraph

All five of these deals share the same DNA. Vertical specialisation, sticky customers, recurring revenue, profitable operations, low founder dependency, clean financials, strategic buyer with an obvious cross-sell or roll-up thesis. There's nothing unusual about any one ingredient. What's unusual is having all of them at the same time, in the same business, when a buyer with budget walks into the room.

If you're building a SaaS business in 2026 and you're looking at the AI-fundraising arms race wondering if you're missing the point: you're not. The market for boring, profitable, vertical SaaS businesses has never been better. The buyers are active. The multiples are climbing. The work to be acquirable is the same work it's always been.

The unsexy truth: most life-changing exits don't come from the company everyone's heard of. They come from the company nobody outside its niche has heard of, with the customers nobody outside its niche cares about, with the metrics every buyer cares about.

If you're running one of those: protect it. Polish it. Position it. The deal you do in the next two years is the one that matters.

Want to see more deals like these?

The Exit Mode M&A archive tracks UK and European deals across sectors with searchable filters by year, sector, and deal type. We add new completed transactions every week. If you're building toward an exit, the most useful thing you can do this month is read 30 recent deals in your sector and ask: which of these does my business look like? That's where your buyer pool actually lives.

– Adam