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An HR product that lives inside Microsoft SharePoint, bought for one times revenue with an SBA loan and $75,000 of the buyer's own money — because everyone else thought the Microsoft ecosystem was boring.
about $2M now, roughly $2.2M expected this year · bought for $1.6M, which the bank scored at under 3x SDE on about $550K · the previous owners were taking home around $750K a year on under $2M of top line
He paid one times revenue because he was the only buyer still in the seller's inbox eighteen months later. His own verdict on the search: something strange has to happen for any of these deals to get done.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Andrew Swiler started in distressed private equity in 2006, doing restructuring work on names like Starbucks and Polaroid, burned out on it and on Chicago winters, and left for Europe in May 2010. He met his wife on a beach in Croatia after a kayaking trip, convinced her to move to San Francisco, spent two years doing what would now be called fractional CFO work for startups, and then moved to Barcelona when she decided she had had enough of a city where everyone only talked about technology. In Spain he helped her run an eyewear company — interchangeable customisable glasses, built on about $30,000 of raised money, franchised into Mexico, Italy, Dubai and Abu Dhabi — which they sold in 2019 for not very much, but enough to stop and think. He had been to a search fund conference at IESE in 2016 and never let go of it. Over the next stretch he looked at more than 2,000 deals. Spanish service businesses were priced like American ones with a tenth of the market and ten times the financing difficulty. E-commerce he had already run and did not want back. That left software. Lanteria turned up on SearchFunder, unnoticed, unvoted, nobody paying attention. The seller wanted around three times revenue. Andrew said no thanks and kept checking in. Eighteen months later, with the war in Ukraine on the horizon and their clients and staff getting nervous, he offered one times revenue and they took it. He had no money at that point. He raised it in sixty days, walking ten kilometres a day around the park outside his flat, phoning investors.
Lanteria did not start as a product company. It started as a Microsoft SharePoint consulting firm doing offshore work for American clients, which is why it had a US LLC from 2012 — Americans were not going to pay a Ukrainian entity, so a US company was table stakes.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on a business acquisition podcast, given by the buyer about his own deal. Every figure — the $1.6 million price on $1.6 million of revenue, the roughly $550,000 SDE the bank calculated, the $600–650K of investor capital, his own $75,000, the just-under-$1.2 million SBA loan including $100K working capital, the $100,000 post-closing consulting agreement, the rise from $12K to $16K a month in debt service, and the roughly $2 million current revenue — is stated by him and unaudited here. He flags his own uncertainty in places, saying the SBA total is from memory and that the audited financials available at closing were from 2020 with the 2021 figures unaudited. The claim that Microsoft's user base doubled in 2020 is relayed from another buyer he spoke to during diligence, not sourced. He is unusually candid about what he got wrong, which raises rather than lowers the credibility of the rest.
The first dollars were consulting invoices from American clients, paid to a US entity set up specifically so those invoices would clear. The product's first dollars were perpetual licences — one payment, permanent access, very low price.
The turn came in 2018, when the owners stopped selling perpetual licences and moved to SaaS. They expanded the product into more modules, including a learning system, and raised prices significantly.
Lanteria was flat for three or four years before the sale, growing 3 to 5% a year while comparable products grew 30 to 50%.
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