Tech Industry Acquisitions

Large banks spend Billions on technology. 90% of banks want to buy from Tech and Fintech companies, yet nearly half of all signed contracts failed to Go Live. How do we fix this? 👇 I’ve been selling to large banks for 10 years and worked for a bank helping startups get deals internally for 5 years. Here are the most important lessons I learned when selling to banks (or any large enterprise). 🧠🧠🧠 1️⃣ Why would you want to sell to an incumbent? They sign long contracts (5+ years) for large sums. They’re less worried about price and more worried about performance. Their complex tech stack and being highly regulated means they need A) Every certification B) Detailed policies and procedures C) Massive throughput / low latency 🧠🧠🧠 2️⃣ Understand their world A) Their tech stack is hard to change with 1000s of systems. Adding anything new is complex. B) A meeting isn’t a deal. You might meet “Head of X” but from that to signed deal usually takes years. C) Relationships matter. Understand their world, their pressures and stay patient and you can capture the opportunity. 🧠🧠🧠 3️⃣ They have a complicated buying process A) Innovation teams have PoC budgets. You can get $50k or $100k to prove your product could work but still have low odds of success long term B) Becoming an “approved supplier” is hard. Countless forms, processes and sign-offs are needed, not obvious which at outset 🧠🧠🧠 4️⃣ Their buying is designed for big, not small A) The incumbent has no downside for going slower in a negotiation for a startup that can cost survival. Manage with advocates and senior buy in. B) Don’t assume integration will be easy for them. 81% of banks struggle to integrate with a tech company because the bank lacks experience with APIs. 🧠🧠🧠 5️⃣ The gatekeepers matter. A) Legacy providers are already in and likely have a competing product. Sometimes good > great if it can be operationalized B) Consultants run the show. They recommend vendors for RFIs / RFPs and manage integration. C) Other Fintech companies can be frenemies. RFPs look for “comprehensive solutions,” but sometimes that comes from a partnership not one co. 🧠🧠🧠 6️⃣ Set yourself up for success A) Document your processes, and get your certification in order. B) Sell to the “awake at night” pain point like new regulations C) Find partners who care about your success like legacy providers or consultants 🧠🧠🧠 7️⃣ Closing thoughts There’s an old saying that “incumbents want to be first to be third.” They want innovation only if it's secure and robust enough for their scale. But don’t worry; there’s always one that will make a leap. Find your advocate; find someone who can get it done, and one will lead to many. 🧠🧠🧠 👉 If you enjoyed this, I hope you’ll subscribe to fintechbrainfood (link in bio) #fintech #fintechpartnerships #baas #partnerships

Alcon just walked away from its $430M Lensar acquisition. The FTC blocked it. The stated reason: combining the two biggest players in femtosecond laser-assisted cataract surgery would end a price war that was already benefiting surgeons and patients. That's the regulator's read. Here's the operator's read. When you're 12 months into a regulatory review and you still don't have a clear path to close, the deal math changes. Alcon's CEO said the delay and costs "rendered the transaction unattractive." That's not spin. That's honest deal calculus. This is also the second terminated deal for Alcon in two months. The STAAR Surgical deal fell apart in January on shareholder vote. Two deals, two different failure modes, same company. There's a lesson in that pattern; regulatory exposure and stakeholder alignment aren't diligence footnotes. They're go/no-go inputs that need to be stress-tested before you sign, not managed after you announce. Lensar keeps the $10M deposit. Alcon moves on. And the FLACS market stays competitive. Sometimes the best outcome for operators is the one where you stop before it costs you more than the deposit. https://lnkd.in/eq3AZG8f

Coming from someone who has worked on live M&A projects, I’ve seen why most deals fail to deliver what’s promised. A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Report says nearly 70–90% of mergers don’t achieve expected synergies. The numbers look perfect on Excel, but execution tells another story. → The biggest reason is the cultural mismatch. Two companies merge balance sheets but not mindsets. When teams can’t align on how to work or decide, integration stalls. → Another is overestimated synergies. Cost savings and growth assumptions often look great in models but rarely play out in reality. → Finally, poor integration planning. Months go into valuation, but little time is spent on how the combined company will actually operate. → A classic example is AOL-Time Warner, a $160 billion merger that collapsed due to culture and strategy clashes. In M&A, signing the deal is easy. The real work begins after. Financial models can predict returns, but they can’t measure chemistry. P.S.: Can you think of any Mergers which failed recently?

Over the course of my career I’ve acquired 10 startups. Here’s what I’ve learned 1. Most acquisitions fail This might sound strange coming from someone who’s done it ten times, but acquiring a company is usually a bad idea. Not because of bad strategy or flawed products, but because of what happens after the deal: integration. You’re taking two teams that barely know each other and expecting them to merge cultures, workflows, and goals. It’s speed dating that ends in marriage, and we all know how that usually goes. If you’re not obsessively thinking about integration from day one, you’re setting yourself up to fail. 2. Write your own acquisition playbook, and keep rewriting At Fiverr, every time we’ve made an acquisition, we’ve refined our internal “playbook.” It starts well before any deal is on the table: identifying potential targets, opening conversations and building trust over time. We don’t sit around waiting for the perfect opportunity to fall into our lap. Instead, we proactively map out companies that interest us and start a dialogue, not always with the intention to buy, but often just to get to know great founders and build meaningful relationships. That groundwork makes a huge difference if and when the timing is right. 3. Never acquire based on short-term opportunity Every acquisition must make long-term strategic sense. It has to align with our mission and deliver real acceleration. You can clone almost any product. What you can’t clone is product–market fit and the people who made it happen. A great acquisition brings you both and gives you a serious competitive edge. 4. People matter more than anything This part is non-negotiable. In tech, human capital is everything. You’re not just acquiring IP, you’re betting on the team that made it work. We look for founders and teams who share our belief in democratizing talent and opportunity. People who want to empower creatives, builders, and entrepreneurs, just like we do. Because from the moment the deal is done, Fiverr belongs to them as much as they belong to Fiverr. If they don’t connect with our reason for existing, nothing else matters. 5. Skin in the game drives alignment Equity is the most valuable thing a public company can offer, more than cash, because it represents belief in future upside. Some avoid using equity in acquisitions for exactly that reason. I take the opposite view. Most deals tie founders to short-term targets: hit your KPIs in two or three years, then cash out. But when someone joins Fiverr, they’re not just running their old business under a new logo. They’re part of the company now, and their incentives should reflect that, not just success in their unit, but success for Fiverr as a whole. Shared skin in the game builds real alignment and a stronger company over time. When you get these right, When you truly believe that 1+1 can equal way more than 2, M&A becomes one of the most powerful tools for inorganic growth.

Deep Tech B2B GTM Strategies to Beat the Odds: If you’re building deep tech, the hard part isn’t the science. It’s getting the market to adopt it fast enough to survive. This week, Christopher Engman and I co-hosted a round-table workshop with seven ambitious deep-tech ventures, together with InnovationQuarter Quarter, right in the heart of #Rotterdam. #DeepTech innovators building physical, science- or engineering-based solutions face a completely different level of complexity when scaling into Complexity 5 and 6 enterprises: Complexity 5 → multiple stakeholder groups inside one buyer committee Complexity 6 → multiple buyer committees across a wider ecosystem One of the most common blind spots we see—especially among scientific/engineering-led teams—is when to bring the voice of the market into leadership discussions. The narrative needs to augment the brilliance of the technology with language that buyers can recognize, relate to, and ultimately attach business value to. Below are several key takeaways from the session, in addition to the 15 deep-tech #GTM challenges shared in an earlier post today: 1. The W-Model* How large enterprises actually buy innovation — which is nothing like RFP-driven procurement for known categories. 2. One Hack: The Red Fiat* A strategy for landing early lighthouse deals with clients who may take years to scale adoption — generating the early revenue so vital to deep-tech survivability. 3. Scale What Works In Complexity 5 and 6 environments, the answer isn’t to duplicate your rainmakers — it’s to scale them. These individuals are typically the founders or your top performers with domain sector expertise. 4. The Deal Orchestration Logic Drawn from Fortune 500 tier-1 deal patterns, the Njord model shows how smaller companies can move with the speed of gazelles and beat corporate giants at their own game through: - Stakeholder mapping - Media orchestration - Rainmaker-sourced content - Enterprise-level account research 5. The Enabling System The sales/marketing tech stack for high-complexity deals is generally over-engineered. What’s required instead is a purpose-built Deal Orchestration Enablement System that boosts rainmaker impact and efficiency without adding friction – like what Njord has developed. We currently support ambitious #B2B companies — both #scaleUps and established #enterprises — that already have product–market fit, operate across multiple geographies, and aim to grow faster than their category. To the #founders of ventures who joined us this week: thank you for your openness, energy, and insights. 👉 If you’re a founder, commercial leader, or part of a larger company exploring how to accelerate the adoption of game-changing deep-tech solutions, reach out or drop a comment below. Let’s beat the odds — and unwaste the potential that Europe is overflowing with. (*W-Model and Red Fiat explainer videos in comments) Port of Rotterdam Delft University of Technology

I don’t enjoy talking about failures, but when a $𝟮 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗽𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁, it’s worth asking why. This week, Sonder Inc., once valued at over $2 billion and hailed as “the next Airbnb meets Marriott”, shut down. After 11 years, the company filed for bankruptcy just one day after 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘁𝘁 𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽. At first glance, it looks like a tech integration gone wrong. But the truth runs deeper, and it’s a masterclass in what not to do when building a hospitality-tech business. Here’s what really killed Sonder 👇 1️⃣ The wrong foundation – Sonder’s “master lease” model meant paying fixed rent for thousands of apartments. Great when occupancy is 90%, catastrophic when it’s 60%. They built a hotel chain without owning hotels, but with all the risk of one. 2️⃣ The tech illusion – They called themselves a “tech company,” but their tech was just a digital layer. The core business was real estate, operations, and cleaning, not code. 3️⃣ The lifeline that drowned them – The Marriott deal looked like salvation: access to 200 million Bonvoy members. But the integration failed, costs exploded, and revenue dropped once direct bookings had to go through Marriott (and pay commissions). 4️⃣ Timing and leadership – The founder and CFO left right after the Marriott rollout, a classic red flag. When leadership exits at “the best moment,” it’s rarely a coincidence. So what do we learn from it: - “Tech-enabled” doesn’t make a business scalable. - Operational excellence still beats storytelling. - Partnerships should be tested for dependency risk, not just reach. - If your business model only works in perfect conditions, it’s not innovation, it’s speculation. Failures like this are uncomfortable to watch, but for those of us building in travel and hospitality, they’re invaluable.

After facilitating 250+ tech deals across cycles, I see the M&A playbook in 2026 will require: Strategic engineering. Founders shouldn't: - prep for it when an opportunity comes - then chase every possible buyer - only to settle on weak terms We've seen Google, Salesforce, Verizon and others acquire companies that, on paper, did not “fit” the classic criteria: too small, too niche, too early... But those transactions happened because they were strategically engineered years before. In this market, that usually means a combination of: - A capital-efficient, founder-led company with clean economics - A sharp strategic narrative that solves a specific gap in the acquirer’s product or market map - Direct relationships with product, strategy, and business unit leaders who feel the pain you solve When those three line up, deals that should not happen on a spreadsheet suddenly become obvious inside the boardroom. You can use the set of tools and frameworks below to prepare for this as early as possible. But the core idea is simple: If you build the right business, articulate why you matter to specific acquirers, and stay close to the people shaping their roadmaps, you don't have to “sell” your company. You create the conditions for the right buyer to conclude that acquiring you is the logical next step. i5growth / i5invest: Investment Fund, global tech M&A arm, team of 100+, offices in San Francisco, Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, Frankfurt; 200+ exits & strategic partnerships with tech leaders such as Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, Naspers, NBC, … #strategy #startups #growth

"Russia is evading sanctions to acquire U.S.-made semiconductors and weapons components for use in Ukraine—largely through China, according to a new Senate report that led lawmakers to grill chip-making executives on Tuesday. “Manufacturers are objectively and consciously failing to prevent Russia from benefiting from the use of their technology,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said at a hearing of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report said U.S. chip companies—such as AMD, Texas Instruments, Intel, Analog Devices—have big gaps in their internal auditing, even if they do appear to be in compliance with current laws and export controls. It also said the companies are also slow—at best—to respond to requests from lawmakers, non-governmental organizations, and journalists asking the companies to trace the path from legal sale to Russian missiles. “Intel, Texas Instruments, AMD, and Analog Devices have all received trace requests from external groups showing that their semiconductors have been found in Russian weapon systems. Responses from Intel, Texas Instruments, and Analog Devices to these trace requests, which seek to help understand how Russia is continuing its war efforts in Ukraine, have been delayed, nonresponsive, or nonexistent,” the report says. [...] Said Blumenthal: “It’s a war that's going on for two years, export sanctions for two years. You told this committee just minutes ago that you believe that these computer chips are all old, but your company hasn't sent a team there to inspect them. You haven't taken steps to verify whether that information is correct. That's just your opinion or belief.” A larger potential obstacle to tackling illicit chip transfers to Russia, even if these companies committed to more internal audits and worked more proactively with outside monitoring groups and agencies, the companies’ ongoing business with China suggests that the transfers would continue anyway. According to the Senate report: “Exports to Hong Kong and China from the four companies have decreased year-to-year from 2021 to 2023, but reports regarding Russia’s ability to evade U.S. sanctions have repeatedly highlighted Hong Kong and China as the two largest continuing sources of semiconductors to Russia.” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas., put the problem to the company executives directly. “Certainly, it appears that China is intimately involved in this process,” Marshall said. “I assume that every one of you still sells chips to China?” The officials said they did. More than one said that they also had manufacturing agreements with Chinese companies, all perfectly legal under current U.S. law. “You can’t trust them,” said Marshall." From https://lnkd.in/d2qrj_NX

Why your "perfect" solution is stuck in Pilot Purgatory. We’ve all been there. You have a superior product. The champions love it. The ROI calculation is undeniable. Yet, the deal stalls. Weeks turn into months, and eventually, the project quietly dies. In our research for Megadeals and other high complexity deals, we found the root cause is rarely about your product’s features. It is almost always because you failed to map your solution to a Key Initiative. The Hard Truth: Large enterprises don't buy "solutions" to small problems. They invest in strategic outcomes. Every mid sized and large company has 3–5 "Key Initiatives" at any given time (e.g., "Carbon Neutrality by 2030," "Digitizing the Customer Journey," or "Supply Chain Resilience"). These initiatives have Board-level visibility. These initiatives have ring-fenced budgets. These initiatives have clear deadlines. If your solution is not directly attached to one of these trains, you are standing on the platform. You are fighting for scraps of discretionary budget—a dangerous place to be. My advice? If you cannot clearly articulate which Key Initiative your offer supports, you shouldn't be forecasting the deal. You should be disqualifying it or working harder to find the link. Stop pitching "features." Start reading their Annual Report. Listen to the CEO’s latest earnings call. Find the initiative that keeps them up at night, and re-engineer your entire narrative to show how YOU help them execute THAT specific promise to the market. Don't just sell a tool. Sell the bridge to their strategic destination. How often do you check a prospect's Annual Report before the first meeting? #Megadeals #EnterpriseSales #KeyInitiatives #SalesStrategy #B2B