Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The FWDstart Podcast is a weekly show at the intersection of venture capital, startups, and strategic industries shaping the MENA region. Each episode features candid conversations with founders, investors, and operators behind the region’s most ambitious companies, from frontier AI and fintech infrastructure to climate tech, construction, energy, and space.
============================================================
FWDSTART PODCAST — EPISODE 13
============================================================
Glenn Harwood, Co-Founder & CEO of Algo Driven
All-Cash Eight-Figure Exit to Emergent Software
============================================================
COLD OPEN
============================================================
Glenn: As soon as you take VC money, that's the game you've signed up for. You either IPO, you get acquired, or you probably eventually go out of business. Those are your three options. I'd say to one of the valuers, "What's this car worth?" and they'd give me five different answers. "I love the colour." "This car smells good."
Glenn: "My cousin's auntie's sister sold one like this the other week." And to think that we were buying hundreds or thousands of cars a year based on this. My co-founder was like, "We need this in Australia too. If you can build it, I'll start selling it." And away we went.
Glenn: The two options we looked at were raising another round, a Series B or a bridge or a pre-B, or some sort of strategic partnership or acquisition. For the six weeks before the deal closed, I barely slept. I can remember being on holidays over Christmas and getting up at 2am and quickly checking my phone, following up people on emails. The acquirer was in the States. We had investors in the States, in Australia, in the Middle East.
============================================================
INTRODUCTION
============================================================
Jamie: Hello and welcome back to the FWDstart Podcast. It is me, your host, Jamie Lane. We're aware of the fact that we missed last week's episode, but given everything happening in the region at the moment, it just didn't quite feel right to hit publish. So we hope that you are all keeping safe and well, but we are back.
Jamie: This week with a genuine rarity in the MENA ecosystem: Glenn Harwood, co-founder and CEO of Algo Driven, a company which has just completed an all-cash, eight-figure exit to Emergent Software in San Francisco. Glenn raised just $3 million across three rounds from the likes of Global Ventures, 500 Global, RSA Capital, and others.
Jamie: The company stayed profitable and has now delivered an immediate cash return to every early investor. During the course of the conversation, we get into the nitty gritty on how the deal came together, why it beat raising a Series B, and what it's actually like closing an acquisition on December 30th across three time zones.
Jamie: But as always, before we get into it...
============================================================
SARWA AD READ
============================================================
Jamie: Warren Buffett once said the stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient, and Lebanese-American mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminded us that you cannot predict, you can only get ready.
Jamie: Those two insights define today's investing environment. You don't win by guessing the next move, you win by preparing, cutting through the noise, and letting discipline compound over time. That's exactly what Sarwa delivers. Sarwa's modern platform is grounded in simplicity and lets you trade stocks, ETFs, crypto options, and high-yield savings, all in one app.
Jamie: They keep your fees low so more of your money goes to work, with minimums as low as $500. Sarwa is loved by experts, not just beginners. Whether you're a first-timer, an active investor, or a day trader, you join hundreds of thousands of users who choose Sarwa to grow their wealth. As a FWDstart listener, you get $200 when you open a new account with code FWDSTART. All the details are in the description, and if you're chatting to the team, please do tell them that Jamie sent you. So what are you waiting for? Get started in minutes and take control of your money, your way. Sarwa is regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority.
Jamie: The information shared in this segment is for educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investing involves risk and past performance is not indicative of future results.
============================================================
THE MOMENT THE DEAL CLOSED
============================================================
Jamie: Glenn, welcome to the podcast. First things first, obviously congratulations. Can we start with the moment that the deal closed? So for context, you've just exited to Emergent Software, a San Francisco-based company, which is extremely exciting. Can you take me back to that day? Where were you? What time was it? Who was the first person you called?
Glenn: Well, these things take a long time. It was over a year in the making. The deal actually closed on the 30th of December, so almost the last day of the year. All through October, November, December it was, "We're gonna close soon, we're gonna close soon." We were trying for Thanksgiving, then we were trying for early December, and then it had to close by end of year. It went all over Christmas, Christmas Day.
Glenn: There was back and forth with everyone all the way through. And then on the 30th, look, I don't remember the exact moment. There were so many false alarms and signatures that weren't quite right, but it was definitely on the 30th. And then of course all the wire transfers get caught on the public holiday.
Jamie: So it ends up being like the second of January by the time the cash gets transferred to everyone. But the official date was the 30th. What was the feeling like when the white smoke went up, as opposed to the grey smoke you're describing in the previous months?
Glenn: I think it was just a relief. For the six weeks before the deal closed, I barely slept. I can remember being on holidays over Christmas and getting up at 2am and quickly checking my phone and following up people on emails, because I didn't want to lose a whole night of sleep and miss people in different time zones. The acquirer was in the States.
Glenn: We had investors in the States, in Australia, in the Middle East, and trying to get everyone to sign. All of those things took a really long time. And time zones really made it hard. Especially with the end-of-year closing down, you didn't want to lose another day.
Glenn: So for the six or eight weeks before it closed, I didn't sleep a whole lot. I was following people up at 2am and I was up at 5am trying to catch people in the San Francisco time zone and lawyers in New York. It was a rough couple of months.
============================================================
THE VENTURE-BACKED MINDSET
============================================================
Jamie: Was there a sense of fulfilment?
Glenn: Yeah. Obviously we'd been working towards this for a year or two, but of course as a venture-backed startup, you're actually working towards it right from the very start. As soon as you take VC money, that's the game you've signed up for.
Glenn: There's got to be some sort of outcome one day. It can't just become a lifestyle business. That wasn't what the VC signed up for. As I said to someone else, you either IPO, you get acquired, or you probably eventually go out of business. It's one of those three options. And we're really happy with where we landed, being acquired.
============================================================
WHAT IS ALGO DRIVEN?
============================================================
Jamie: So for people who maybe don't know who and what Algo Driven is, would you mind giving the 30-second elevator pitch?
Glenn: We make software for car dealerships to help them value, inspect, and appraise used cars. We have about a thousand car dealerships in 10 different countries, predominantly through the Middle East region, as well as Australia and New Zealand. They value $25 billion-plus worth of cars every year. We're really mission-critical to their business, because when a lot of people buy a new car, they want to trade in their old car, and that's the problem we're solving for car dealers.
============================================================
GLENN'S BACKSTORY: FROM COMPUTER STORES TO MERCEDES SALES
============================================================
Jamie: Let's maybe go back a small bit, because during the course of research for this, your backstory is really interesting and I'd like to dig into that. Maybe trace the narrative arc from when you're first back in Australia. Were you always entrepreneurial from a young age? Did you open a computer retail store when you were younger?
Glenn: You've done good research. As I was finishing high school, I opened a computer retail store and I did that for a few years. That didn't really pan out, but it was my first foray into entrepreneurship and retail as a business model.
Glenn: And then I studied finance and law at university, but I took a year off and started selling cars. I thought it would be a fun thing to do. The job I got was at Mercedes-Benz, so I started as a used car salesman at Mercedes-Benz. Then I had to go back to uni because I couldn't put my degrees on hold forever.
Glenn: I sort of balanced the two for a while, working close to full-time and studying half or two-thirds time. I moved to a different Mercedes dealer, was a new car sales consultant. Did quite well at that, got to the top 15 Mercedes salespeople in Australia. I was having a ball in my mid-twenties. Going to the Monaco Grand Prix with Mercedes, racing cars around racetracks, driving an AMG to work. Life could be worse for a guy in his mid-twenties. I'm like, why would I ever want to be a lawyer when I'm doing this all day?
Glenn: Then I became a used car sales manager at that dealership. One of the reasons I was given that role is because the owner wanted to have a more analytical approach to used cars. He'd seen some new ideas out of the States where they were using a lot of metrics and numbers to drive what cars to stock, how to price used cars. Really applying science to what was more of an art form.
Glenn: I was given this book and told to read it by Monday morning, and from Monday morning I was a used car manager. I read the book, I was incentivised to apply everything in it, and we got the used car department to, overall on all the metrics put out by Mercedes, the number one used car department in Australia. I did that for a few years.
============================================================
THE DRAW TO SELLING CARS
============================================================
Jamie: What was the draw to selling cars originally, to take a year out of university? What attracted you to that?
Glenn: I loved cars, luxury cars in particular. I thought they were really interesting and a lot of fun. I thought sales was interesting, an interesting thing to learn. And for successful people in the automotive industry, as in real estate, it can be quite financially rewarding.
Glenn: So I thought, let's see how I go with this. It's never quite as fun as you think it is, of course, but I certainly enjoyed it. And I found selling is actually more of a learned skill than what people think. People think you're born a salesman, but in my opinion it's more of a learned skill.
Glenn: Also, selling that particular brand, selling luxury cars, you had an interesting customer base. You generally had business owners buying these cars, or quite wealthy professionals. Having studied finance at university, I found that I could relate to these customers. When they made comments about needing to speak to their accountant to work out how they're going to structure a purchase in their business, you can relate to that sort of conversation.
Glenn: If a customer's spending one or two hundred thousand dollars on a Mercedes-Benz, they're typically successful business owners. The car was one part of the transaction, but it was also how they could make it work for their business. All of that was helpful.
============================================================
MOVING TO THE MIDDLE EAST
============================================================
Jamie: So what brings you to Dubai then?
Glenn: I was now in my late twenties and ready for a bit of an overseas adventure. I'd finished my uni studies, so I started applying for jobs internationally in automotive. I ended up getting a job with Mercedes-Benz in Al Ain, actually, for Mercedes Abu Dhabi. So I didn't come straight to Dubai. I came to Al Ain, which is about an hour out of Abu Dhabi, out in the desert.
Glenn: I was sales manager at a Mercedes dealership there for about three and a half years and really enjoyed that experience. Same brand, but a different part of the world. That was a great role for learning about the region and giving me some career growth. After that I ended up getting a job in Dubai at BMW, where I was used car manager looking after Dubai and the Northern Emirates for BMW used cars.
Jamie: And when does Algo Driven happen then?
Glenn: I did a couple of years at BMW and then started the business with my co-founder, who I knew from working at Mercedes Australia. He was actually the person who gave me my job when I was 20, my very first job selling cars. I'd stayed in touch with him and our paths had crossed in careers again. We'd worked together a few times before I left for the Middle East.
============================================================
THE SPARK: WHY CAR DEALERS NEED BETTER DATA
============================================================
Glenn: I remember I was back in Australia and I'm thinking, we need more tools to help car dealers value used cars. I'd say to one of the valuers, "What's this car worth?" and I'd ask the four valuers the price, and they'd give me five different answers. And what was worse, I'd say to them, "Why is it worth this?"
Glenn: The answers were things like, "I love the colour," or "This car smells good," or "My cousin's auntie's sister sold one like this the other week and I think they sold it for this." And to think that we were buying hundreds or thousands of cars a year based on this. This was what was going on behind the curtain in a car dealership.
Glenn: I thought there's got to be a better way. We need to give these guys the tools, the data, to make informed, data-driven decisions. My co-founder was like, "We need this in Australia too. If you can build it, I'll start selling it." And away we went.
============================================================
THE REAL COST OF GETTING VALUATIONS WRONG
============================================================
Jamie: How much money do you think dealerships were leaving on the table due to bad appraisals?
Glenn: It's not even just leaving money on the table. Dealers make mistakes all the time. They've got humans valuing these cars. Humans make mistakes. A mistake on a car can be $10,000 by forgetting to check if the car's got a sunroof, or maybe the customer changed the badge on the back from 730 to 750, and we just looked at the badge without actually checking the engine to see if it really was a 750.
Glenn: All of these things catch humans out all the time. As much as you can put processes in place, humans still make mistakes. It's definitely hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, a year, both from mistakes and lost sales. Because two things can happen: you either buy the car and pay too much, or you make a mistake and give the customer a price that's too low, and they buy a car elsewhere because they valued the car correctly. So it's not only the trade-in, the dealership maybe didn't sell the new car either, so they lost two sales. It can really be a lot of money on the line getting this stuff right.
Glenn: As the business grew, we realised we were lucky to have tackled that problem. When you're tackling a problem for any business as a startup, if there's money on the line in the problem you're solving, what the customer's gonna pay for your solution is no longer a nice-to-have. There's a very measurable ROI. That was never our intention when we started this. We built the product for ourselves. But a few years in, when we looked at other businesses, we thought, the great thing about this problem is there's a lot of money on the line. When there's money on the line, people will pay money to make sure they get it right.
============================================================
BUILDING THE PRODUCT: MOBILE-FIRST WITH CONSUMER FEEL
============================================================
Jamie: How do you create the platform?
Glenn: It's obviously evolved a lot over eight years, but when we got started, I built it and my co-founder sold it. That was the original split in duties, and it's still the split today.
Jamie: So you coded it yourself?
Glenn: Yeah, coded it myself. Got a few freelancers to help as well, but primarily myself. My business partner looks after a lot of sales and operations and the Australian side of the business. I look after a lot of product, engineering, investors, and the back-office side.
Jamie: Were you self-taught as far as coding is concerned?
Glenn: Yeah. I was right at the cusp of that age group that got computers in high school. I'd learned how to code. My dad had taught me when I was a child, and I'd learned how to code through high school. I'd never really done anything with it, but it sort of comes back to you. And of course as we scaled, we built out an engineering team.
Glenn: That's also what made our product really unique. On one hand, both my co-founder and I had the experience of knowing what a car dealer wanted and how the product flow should work. Other people who'd had a crack at this problem had missed the mark because maybe they didn't have that automotive background.
Glenn: On the flip side, because I had a genuine passion for technology, I was able to look at the trends in consumer products. Products like Slack were coming out around that time, which were consumer-feel enterprise products. So I thought, what are these products doing well? How can we incorporate that? Let's make it mobile-first. We didn't have web dashboards originally. It was just a mobile app, which for enterprise software eight years ago was really unusual.
Glenn: We tried to give it a consumer feel, but for a car dealer. When car dealers picked up our product, and even one said this last week, "We pick up your product and we instantly know what to do next because it's obviously been made for car dealers. It matches the flow of how we value a car and we just know what button to hit next because it's obvious."
Jamie: It is non-obvious to go mobile-first for someone external to the industry. They'd go, "We'll create the desktop and maybe a mobile version as well."
Glenn: The manual process we were replacing was: the consumer comes in to buy a car, they look at the new cars in the showroom, they get interested, maybe go for a test drive, and then they say, "I need you to value my car, which is outside in the car park." Before our product, someone would walk out into the car park with a clipboard and pen, stand there looking at the car, and write down: BMW 7 Series, plate number, green, good tyres.
Glenn: So to us it was obvious. This is mobile-first. Everyone's got a mobile phone in their pocket. You walk out there, look at the car, scan the plate, the plate pulls the chassis number and tells you everything about the car. You walk around it, take some photos, put in the number of kilometres it's done. Finished.
Glenn: We just digitised that same process. But other people who looked at this had tried to digitise the clipboard piece of paper and put it on an iPad. Then you had 40 dropdowns and 40 free-text fields, which was more painful than using a pen and paper. Nobody wanted that. We said, let's do this data-first. Let's use the camera on the phone, live scanning of the licence plate, all of these things, and just make it really fast and really simple.
============================================================
FEEDBACK AND MARKET EVOLUTION
============================================================
Jamie: What was the feedback to V1 like?
Glenn: I can't remember, it was that long ago. I'm sure it's no different to when we release a new update today. A lot of people love it, there's probably a few things that need tuning up and tweaking. It's a process. It's never like you're finished. It's always, we can make this better, we can make this smoother, we can make this easier to use, we can make it faster. You learn more over time.
Glenn: Also the market changes over time. What our product is today probably wouldn't have worked eight years ago because we were new to that market. Everyone was used to clipboard and pen. Now, eight years on, people have become used to our product or one of our competitors' products, and the way they think about the process is different too. So what we can do now is different because the market has changed as well.
============================================================
FIRST CUSTOMERS AND TAKING VC MONEY
============================================================
Jamie: What's the moment you realise, okay, we're onto something here, rather than just me creating it and my co-founder selling it? We need to formalise this and scale it.
Glenn: I think it's a couple of things. We got two or three customers off the get-go, which of course were people we knew. Like anyone, we tapped our own network first. That gave us some feedback. We were using the app ourselves. Then really early on, we got accepted into an accelerator with accelerator funding. That really changed everything. I think that was the moment it was like, right, this is going to happen.
Glenn: It's not a side project anymore. When you take someone else's money, it changes everything. Then of course you have metrics to hit, you want to hit your next round, you start scaling. You can invest more in the product and invest more in sales. I think that was the moment more than anything else that really dialled things up.
============================================================
THE VENTURE ROUTE AND GLOBAL AMBITION
============================================================
Jamie: Was the ambition always to take external funding and go down the venture route?
Glenn: Yeah, I think so. Winding the clock back seven or eight years ago, you had all these VC-backed startups making waves. It was the early days of Uber. Apps like Slack were coming to the enterprise with a consumer-first feel. SaaS as a category had really been defined suddenly. There were VCs in the region and internationally investing. That startup era was really getting underway.
Glenn: We thought, we think this is something we can scale internationally. We can grow and there's a really big problem we're trying to solve. We can build a really big business around it.
Jamie: One of the things that's often levelled against startups from the region is that they're often quite insular and inward-looking in terms of where they're building. But for you, the ambition was always that this can be something global?
Glenn: Of course. You need scale too. It really depends what you're building as to whether you can get scale in the region or need to go internationally. When you look at the number of car dealers in the region and how much we charge an average car dealership, it's a great opportunity, but we're not going to build a huge venture-scale business just from the region.
Glenn: Equally, we were also operating in Australia. We couldn't do it just from Australia either. To create something venture-scale, we had to tackle multiple markets. That's really important, and I think it's really important to have that mindset from day one. We're starting in this market, we're going to learn some things, tick some boxes, but then we're going to expand into these other markets.
Glenn: We said, if we want to build a billion-dollar company, this is how many car dealerships we need. That's more than what there is in the Middle East. That's more than what there is in the Middle East and Australia. So how many countries? How many are in North America? How many are in Europe? Working back and saying, if that's the sort of scale this product can hit, how does that leverage into your funding rounds?
Glenn: Some products, there is enough scale to do it in the region, especially if it's more a consumer-facing product. But other products, probably more in the B2B category, you need the international scale. And even for consumer too, you might be able to do it faster if you tackle two or three regions. It's not about doing it all at once, but just thinking about it. Each region adopts at different rates. When we started, Australia adopted our product a lot faster than the Middle East, but over the years there's been times where the Middle East has grown faster. We have different average customer values in each. As a startup, you can really take advantage of those things. You don't have to be locked to one market. If you think multi-market from the start, I think it's a huge advantage.
============================================================
THE SALES MOTION
============================================================
Jamie: What was the sales motion like? I'm curious about selling into dealerships. Who's the decision maker? What's the process?
Glenn: We've always been face-to-face sales, and we still are today. I think B2B lends itself a little bit more to face-to-face sales. And our product's at a price point where it's probably a little bit expensive for self-serve, especially for a larger dealership. But equally, it's not a huge enterprise product, so we've always been face-to-face. Typically, especially after COVID, we do a Zoom call or a couple of Zoom calls, maybe a face-to-face visit. A couple of presentations and then we move on to contract and get the dealership rolled out.
Jamie: What's the actual business model?
Glenn: We're a SaaS business model. We charge a subscription fee per showroom. The monthly fee scales up based on the number of cars they appraise. So it's volume-based SaaS pricing, a subscription per car showroom.
============================================================
THE $2 MILLION SERIES A
============================================================
Jamie: In 2021 you raised a $2 million Series A, I think with Global Ventures. That's a small Series A. Was that a deliberate choice, or was that the market at that time?
Glenn: I think it was a combination of both. We've always been really capital-efficient. We were profitable before this acquisition. We've been profitable at times over the company's history. So we've always been really capital-efficient. You only need so much capital, and there are pluses and minuses to taking a lot of capital. It was a combination of that's what we thought we needed, that's what we were able to raise, and of course raising leverages into valuation as well. So all of those things are interconnected.
Jamie: Break down that $2 million for me. What are you using that for?
Glenn: We mainly used it for the same thing we've done since day one. We really just do two things: we build stuff and we sell it. It just went into growing the engineering team to build more product and growing the sales and marketing side of the business. It's roughly 40% engineering, 40% sales and marketing, and 20% general and admin.
Jamie: Help me understand international expansion then, because that doesn't seem like an enormous amount of capital to expand to 14 countries. How do you actually enter a market?
Glenn: That's something we worked on over time, that playbook. There's a little bit of product customisation. Automotive markets are a little bit different in each country: different cars on the road, the pricing dynamics are different. So there's a level of customisation to the product to make sure it resonates with that market.
Glenn: Then you really need one or two key customers to get started with. Ideally, reasonably large customers, early adopters of technology, progressive. That's been our playbook of going into a new market. We get started with that and then go from there, signing up more customers.
============================================================
FOUR YEARS WITHOUT RAISING, AND THE PATH TO EMERGENT
============================================================
Jamie: So you go four years without raising. That's a long time.
Glenn: Yeah. The market has changed over the last four years as well. Changed a lot in the last six to twelve months, certainly. And even in the last few weeks. As a business, we were looking at different options. This deal with Emergent was over a year in the making. You need to dial back two years to when these conversations were happening.
Glenn: The two options we looked at were raising another round, a Series B or a bridge or a pre-B, or some sort of strategic partnership or acquisition. One of the things we loved about Emergent is they want to keep investing in the business, investing in the product, and investing in sales.
Glenn: So it allows us to do many of the things we would've done with another fundraising round. And at the same time, being able to take some chips off the table as founders, get an exit for our early investors, ticking all of those boxes along the way. And of course they bring their other portfolio companies and a whole lot of things to the table apart from capital. So that made it a really appealing option for us.
============================================================
NAVIGATING COVID
============================================================
Jamie: Talk to me about COVID, which we maybe glossed over. I'd imagine that was a difficult period. Probably wasn't an enormous amount of cars being appraised.
Glenn: Car dealerships were shut down as everyone was told to stay at home. Cars weren't being appraised. If our customers were shut down, we didn't feel right about charging them to use our product. So if the car dealership was shut down by law, we paused their subscription, which was the right thing to do for our customers. If they couldn't open, they shouldn't have to pay for our software. But it wasn't great for cash flow.
Glenn: One thing that helped us is when we looked at the different markets we were in, they weren't shutting down at exactly the same time. They staggered a little bit, so we didn't have revenue go to zero. And in different markets, there were different government programmes available, which were very helpful. It was a rough couple of months.
Glenn: We were also starting to have conversations around raising our Series A, so that got put on hold as everyone waited to see how COVID was going to pan out. It was an interesting 12 to 18 months.
============================================================
INVESTOR RELATIONSHIPS
============================================================
Jamie: How does your relationship with investors evolve over time? How involved are they?
Glenn: We were really lucky that all our investors were really great investors. We've got great relationships with all of them. We've known them all for a long time. The partners at all the firms have been there a long time. They've been on this journey with us, some of them from that very first investment eight years ago.
Glenn: Everyone's invested in the business and in an outcome, trying to get the best outcome we can for everyone: for the investors, for the customers, for the employees. We didn't really have any issues. Everyone was very collaborative and working towards common goals. There was a lot of goodwill.
Jamie: Which investor added the most value?
Glenn: They all added an equal amount of value, Jamie.
Jamie: That's a bullshit answer, Glenn. It's like asking who your favourite child is.
Glenn: Every investor adds value in different ways. They all added value, but not in the same way. Each one's got their speciality and the thing that they're more helpful with. Over time you learn which investors to lean on for different problems and at different points in the journey. So everyone added a unique amount of value at a different time.
Jamie: There's a path to politics in the near future, Glenn. That's a very good answer.
============================================================
HOW EMERGENT FOUND ALGO DRIVEN
============================================================
Jamie: Talk to me about Emergent. Does Emergent come to you, or do you go to Emergent?
Glenn: It was that long ago I can't exactly remember who reached out to who. They had a lot of interest in this space. One of their verticals is automotive dealer software. They had a particular interest in vehicle appraisal tools.
Jamie: Good fit.
Glenn: That's what I thought! I didn't think anyone else in the world got excited about that like I did. It was a match made in heaven. They had also made another acquisition in the space of vehicle appraisal tools in North America. They had come to the same conclusion that it was an area of the business where there was a lot of money on the line. That made it a mission-critical piece of software and something that fit their investment thesis.
Glenn: It was a long time in the making, getting to know each other. No different from raising a round from investors. There's a period of getting to know each other, getting to know the business, the market, the team, the customers. But over the last 12 to 18 months, it sort of took shape.
Jamie: What is their thesis?
Glenn: They're a hold-forever company. They're interested in a few different verticals: health tech, cloud infrastructure, and automotive software. They're looking for mission-critical software businesses with recurring revenue that they can put into their portfolio, continue to grow, and drive value in after the acquisition, with the founders staying on and continuing to work with them to achieve those goals.
============================================================
DEAL MECHANICS
============================================================
Jamie: When you were exploring potential exits and acquisitions, did you always want to stay on? Was that always an ambition?
Glenn: Yeah. There's still a lot of things we want to do. My co-founder and I love the job, love what we do, and love what we've built. What we didn't necessarily want was for our product to get bought and stuck on the shelf and forgotten about. That's sort of what we wanted to avoid. So yeah, we're really excited to stay on and work with them. They bring a lot to the table. There's a lot we can do over the next few years together.
Jamie: I want to understand the deal mechanics a little bit better. It's all cash. Would you help me understand what a multiple looks like on a business of your size and growth rate?
Glenn: The amount isn't being disclosed, but it was an eight-figure deal. Roughly, without committing to anything specific, SaaS multiples have compressed over the last three or four years. I think everyone got a fair deal given the current market for SaaS businesses.
Jamie: Did you have any competing offers? Was this the first acquisition offer you had?
Glenn: Over the years, like any startup that's had a little bit of success and made waves in the industry, there's always casual conversations going on. But the Emergent offer really stood out because it allowed us to stay on. They were happy to invest in the business. They had a strong thesis which was a good fit.
Jamie: We were discussing before we started recording that exits are a rarity regionally in the first place, and immediate cash exits are also definitely a rarity. What was the reaction of your investors when you told them?
Glenn: They were happy. Every investor's always happy when there's an exit. Everyone works for years to get this sort of outcome. We worked with all of our investors through the process and kept them updated. Everyone was really happy with the outcome: myself and my co-founder, our investors. And I think it's good for the ecosystem too.
============================================================
WOULD YOU STILL TAKE THE VENTURE ROUTE TODAY?
============================================================
Jamie: Looking back on it, if you were to build Algo Driven again today, in the area in which we live now with all things AI and vibe coding, do you think you would still go down the venture route?
Glenn: Yeah. Going down the venture route worked really well for us. It obviously allowed us to scale a lot faster, which is the idea of taking venture capital. It helped, it changed the way we thought about go-to-market.
Glenn: The market's different to what it was seven or eight years ago. Back then, car dealerships weren't buying many apps. There weren't many software pieces in this space. It was really about signing up customers as quickly as we could. We're now at almost the other extreme where a lot of businesses are like, "We've got too many SaaS subscriptions, we've got an app for everything." They're thinking about how to consolidate. There's also less wide-open space for anyone new coming in.
Glenn: In the land of SaaS, almost every problem feels like it's been solved. There's a SaaS app to do more or less everything. So venture capital was good for the point in time we were operating in. Certain businesses are more suitable to venture capital than others. There has to be a huge TAM, an opportunity to scale, a need for capital.
Glenn: With vibe coding and AI, it's perhaps changed the amount of capital that some businesses need, but I don't think it's changed the need for venture capital at all. Even if you can build software faster with vibe coding, a lot of businesses still need face-to-face to scale. You still need an office, you still need engineers to run the vibe coding. It might change the amount or how quickly you can scale, but it doesn't necessarily change the need for venture capital. Perhaps there are some businesses which are no longer venture-backable, they now fall into a different bucket. But I don't think it fundamentally changes the industry.
============================================================
AI AND BUILDING INTERNALLY
============================================================
Jamie: Has AI drastically changed how you build internally?
Glenn: Yeah, we're able to build new features so much faster. We're able to test our products better. It has been a huge shift.
Jamie: What does the internal stack look like at the moment?
Glenn: Myself and the engineering team love Cursor. We're using that for most of our coding. I was sitting with one of the team leads a day or two ago and he brought to me that he'd had an AI tool analyse the code base and summarise all the business logic. Things like that, which might have taken people weeks, are done in a few days, and then maybe a day for someone to check it over. It's certainly making us a lot more efficient.
============================================================
WHAT'S NEXT
============================================================
Jamie: Would you ever build another startup outside of this world?
Glenn: Yeah. I think once you've got the bug, you've always got ideas. But I've got my work cut out with everything going on for now. Once you've got that bug, you look at things all the time and think, someone could do a really good job of building that, or there's a hole in the market there. Of course, you can't go and build all these things, but you still see them.
Jamie: Will you be staying on with Algo Driven? Is there a mandated period of time?
Glenn: I'm staying on indefinitely. As long as they'll have me. That was the attraction of partnering with them. It was not just the capital, it was their interest in this space, the investment they wanted to make, their other portfolio companies that we can work with. We're really just getting started. We're certainly looking at the North America region and how we can leverage their network to expand our customer base there. Some of their portfolio companies are looking at some of the unique technologies we've got and how they can integrate that. There's a lot to do over the next few years.
============================================================
REFLECTIONS ON THE JOURNEY
============================================================
Jamie: Looking back on the journey, is there anything you'd change or do differently with the benefit of hindsight?
Glenn: I'm sure there's probably a thousand different things, but generally we've had a really good run. We've built a really influential product in the automotive space. We've had a really good run with our investors and raising the investor rounds, and managing to close that loop out with the exit. We've got a really great team, some of whom have been with us almost since day one. Of course there's always things at the margin you'd do slightly differently. But all in all, I think we've had a really good run.
Jamie: Fantastic. Well Glenn, that's everything that I have. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
Glenn: Thank you, Jamie.