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- Climb's M&A Weekly: Volaris, Valsoft, and Cognition all feature
Climb's M&A Weekly: Volaris, Valsoft, and Cognition all feature
Volaris and Valsoft both make acquisitions in the Nordics
Climb Advisors Weekly
July 20, 2025
Welcome back to the Climb Advisors weekly newsletter with five deals from across the B2B tech landscape.
Climb Advisors focuses on sell-side advisory for B2B Software and services companies generating $5m-$15m in revenue. We also advise on credit solutions for companies of the same profile & in select cases engage in retained buy-side processes for quality buyers. We love to talk markets and make introductions - please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re a founder or investor looking to transact.
Volaris Group acquires Surverypal Oy
Overview: Volaris Group purchases Surveypal Oy, a Finnish company that provides automated survey software that measures company data. Surveypal Oy's tools deliver business intelligence metrics to nearly 600 Finnish companies and help those organizations make data-driven decisions. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Volaris Group is an operating group of Constellation Software, a serial acquirer that utilizes a buy and hold forever strategy in the vertical software market. Volaris has completed hundreds of acquisitions and has never sold a business. Constellation has been one of the best performing stocks in history, up ~17,500% since inception. Since Constellation IPO’d in 2006, the stock has had a CAGR of ~36%. Constellation has bought over 500 businesses and usually buys its businesses at ~1x revenue so this deal figures to be somewhere in this range. Surveypal will operate independently while Volaris helps Surveypal continue its success.
Valsoft acquires Tiltid
Overview: Valsoft, a company that buys and holds vertical market software, similar to Volaris and Constellation, acquires Tiltid, a Swedish company offering cloud-based scheduling and staffing solutions for the retail, restaurant, and hospitality sectors. This acquisition is Valsoft's ninth investment in the workforce management vertical, reinforcing its presence in a mission-critical industry and in the Swedish market. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Valsoft has acquired over 50 companies worldwide spanning over 10 countries. The workforce management space has been a focus for Valsoft, and Tiltid's cloud-based scheduling solutions for retail, restaurant, and hospitality sectors should fit in nicely with their existing portfolio. Tiltid will continue to operate independently, much like the Volaris deal, and Valsoft will help with additional resources, operational best practices, and strategy.
Cognition buys AI startup, Windsurf
Overview: Cognition acquires Windsurf, the agentic IDE. An agentic IDE, or integrated development environment, uses AI agents to automate some coding tasks. Over the next few months, Windsurf will continue to operate independently before Cognition begins integrating Windsurf’s agentic AI capabilities in its products. Windsurf has over 350 enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands daily users. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Windsurf generates $82m in ARR with the company’s enterprise ARR doubling QoQ. There is a strong strategic fit here with Cognition’s DEVIN integrating with Windsurf’s IDE capabilities. This deal has a pretty unique structure as OpenAI was in talks to purchase Windsurf for $3 billion before that deal ultimately fell through. Once the OpenAI deal fell through, Google purchased licensing rights and some top employees from Windsurf for $2.4 billion. Cognition is buying the rest of Windsurf. There is intense competition for talent in the AI space as evidenced by this deal and Mark Zuckerberg publicly offering packages in the hundreds of millions to top talent at OpenAI, Gemini, etc.
Rydoo, backed by Marlin Equity and Eurazeo, acquires Semine
Overview: Rydoo, an expense management solutions company, purchases Semine, a provider of AI-powered accounts payable automation (APA) technology. Rydoo currently supports over 1 million users worldwide in automating expense management, helping finance teams streamline their operations. Rydoo wants to build a platform to connect all the different spend management workflows. Read more here.
Climb Comment: In 2024, Eurazeo became Rydoo’s majority shareholder, providing the backing for a growth acquisition such as this one. Accounts payable and employee expenses are both a part of the CFO’s office but they are usually not handled together. This acquisition brings both into one platform for the CFO’s office and enhances back office efficiency using AI. Rydoo and Semine are developing a solution that provides the CFO teams with end-to-end visibility, real-time insights, and smoother integrations. This deal positions Rydoo to offer a more comprehensive spend management solution as finance teams increasingly seek integrated platforms.
Frontier Growth purchases a minority stake in EPR Fireworks
Overview: Frontier Growth, a vertical SaaS growth equity firm, makes a minority investment in EPR Fireworks, a company that provides software solutions for fire and EMS departments. EPR’s solutions include cloud-based unified records management and operations software. The capital injection from Frontier will power the advancement of EPR’s core capabilities and development of new solutions. Read more here.
Climb Comment: Frontier Growth focuses on mission critical vertical SaaS platforms, making EPR a nice fit for their investment strategy. The public safety software market has seen increased demand as fire and EMS departments digitize their operations and data management solutions become more necessary. This minority investment structure allows EPR's founding team to maintain control while gaining access to Frontier Growth's expertise in scaling vertical SaaS businesses.
Article of the week
The article this week is an interview with Alan Waxman, the founder of Sixth Street. Alan also worked for the “Navy Seals of Finance,” which was the special situations group at Goldman Sachs. The SSG group at Goldman has numerous notable alumni.
Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re considering a sale this year - we’re always glad to chat & share perspective.
All the best,
Nick