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Two brothers turned broken campus blue-light phones into an assembly line of white-labelled safety apps — UCLA got Bruin Safe, NYU got Safe NYU — and sold the company at roughly $7M ARR and 60% margin for $40M.
~60% profit margin · 20 employees · $40M acquisition closed 1 February 2022, a year after turning down $20M from the same buyer · first $1M in year four or five, $2M the next year, 400% YoY growth
Asked on a Zoom call what they would sell for, his brother blurted out "20" — and the $20M offer that came back had an earnout attached. They walked, spent a year taking revenue from about $6M to $7M, and the same buyer returned and doubled it. "One trick with sales is you never put a number out there."
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
In 2011 David Sinkinson was working at his alma mater when an audit of the campus blue-light emergency poles came back ugly: a lot of them were broken. His pitch was that the phone already in every student's pocket could do the job better — press a button and your location streams in real time to campus police, who come and find you. He built it with his brother Chris, ten years older and, by David's account, the far better coder. What made AppArmor a company rather than an app was the decision not to ship one app. They built an assembly line for custom-branded safety apps: UCLA got Bruin Safe, NYU got Safe NYU, Princeton got Safe Princeton. The institution paid; students downloaded their own school's name from the store. The platform grew to about 50 features, and the one that mattered commercially was mass notification — the bomb threat, the shooting, the weather event, the pandemic. That feature carried them up-market against emergency-notification incumbents whose software dated to 2005 and 2006, one of it built on ColdFusion, and who needed three disconnected systems to send an email, a text and a phone call. AppArmor did all of it from the dashboard the customer was already in. They crossed their first million in revenue around year four or five, hit $2M the following year on 400% year-over-year growth, and landed on Canada's list of 500 fastest-growing companies at 30th for software. At roughly $7M ARR, about 60% profit margin and 20 employees, they sold on 1 February 2022 for $40M to the private-equity owner of a competitor — having turned down $20M from the same buyer a year earlier. That competitor, Rave Mobile Safety, was then sold on to Motorola Solutions for $560M.
The first customer came out of a room David was already sitting in. He worked at his alma mater, ran the audit that found the blue-light emergency poles broken, and pitched the idea to a campus safety working group — a committee with members drawn from across the university.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on an M&A podcast. Every figure here — the first $1M in year four or five, $2M the following year, 400% year-over-year growth, about $6M when the first offer arrived, $7M ARR at sale, 50–60% profitability at peak and about 60% at exit, 20 employees, the $20M offer turned down, the $40M price closing 1 February 2022, and the later $560M Motorola Solutions purchase of Rave Mobile Safety — is stated by David Sinkinson himself and is unaudited. AppArmor was private, so none of it is verifiable from filings here, and the interview does not specify a currency. No customer count, churn rate or individual contract price was given. The 6–6.5x earnings multiple mentioned in the episode is the hosts' arithmetic on his numbers, done live on air.
The first dollar came from an institution rather than a student, and that choice was the whole business model. David is blunt that selling personal safety direct to consumers fails — several companies tried it in the same era and largely did — because nobody buys a home security system until after the break-in.
Two things compounded. The first was a content management system for the native apps.
The stretch lasted four or five years — that is how long the first million dollars took — and David remembers exactly how it ended.
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