Founders talk about ‘exits’ like it's one thing. It’s not. Who buys you, why, and what happens after depends on what they're actually buying, and on how much work you put into finding them before you need to.
Here are the routes that actually happen. Plus the one nobody wants to write about - no exit at all.
By the way, most acquisitions don't work out for the buyer. A 2024 analysis of 40,000 acquisitions over 40 years by NYU researchers found 70-75% failed to deliver the sales growth, cost savings, or share-price gains the buyer expected. Getting bought is just the start of a process that fails more often than it succeeds, for reasons mostly outside the founder's control.
The synergy buy
A bigger player acquires you because your growth trajectory tells a story they want to be part of, not because your revenue justifies the price today. This was eBay buying Skype: enormous user growth, thin revenue, but momentum that made eBay believe the combination would unlock something bigger. In hindsight, eBay overpaid, and the strategic fit was weaker than they'd hoped.
Skype later ended up at Microsoft, which on paper was the better fit: communications infrastructure, enterprise reach, natural synergies. It still ended badly. Microsoft had competing internal products and, years later, chose to kill Skype.
The lesson: being acquired for synergies doesn't mean the synergies materialise, and ‘better fit on paper’ can still lose to internal politics years down the line. Getting bought and the acquisition succeeding are two separate events.
Scenario: Standout growth metrics. A strategic buyer with a bigger platform wants to own the curve before a competitor does.
The capability buy
Sometimes a buyer isn't chasing your growth chart. They're buying something they can't build internally: an algorithm, a community, a workflow, a way of getting users to behave differently.
GrabCAD was acquired by a legacy industrial player who saw we'd activated the mechanical engineering community around crowdsourced design and collaboration tools that didn't exist inside their walls. They didn’t buy the revenue (there was still very little of it) but rather a capability, an audience they had no organic path to, and a team who had figured it out.
Scenario: Genuine engagement in a niche a legacy incumbent serves but can't innovate inside. The incumbent buys the shortcut.
The financial engineering buy
Not every acquirer wants to grow you. Some want to optimise you: squeeze… sorry, optimise the backend, manage a controlled decline, use your revenue to spike their topline numbers.
For me this was Applift in Berlin: a declining but cash-generative business, acquired by a publicly traded buyer using bond financing to fund a roll-up strategy.
The job shifted from building to managing decline efficiently, while the parent company used the results to tell a bigger story about portfolio synergies and raise more capital.
The energy inside the company is completely different from a growth acquisition. You're not shipping new things. You're a cash-flow line item in someone else's fundraising narrative. Adjust team attitudes accordingly.
Scenario: Growth has plateaued, but the business still throws off cash. A buyer running a leveraged portfolio strategy acquires you to optimise margins and juice the topline.
The distressed sale
The hardest to pull off, and the one founders assume is impossible: selling a company that's out of money and in debt, with a messy cap table. It can be sold if there's something real underneath, like a hard-won contract pipeline, unique IP, or a team that's proven it can execute.
It means walking a tightrope:
- Staying honest about the real situation, because there's no choice, the buyer will find out.
- Still making a credible case for the upside that isn't obvious from the balance sheet.
The valuation won't be what it could have been in better times. But \less than it could have been’ and ‘nothing’ are very different outcomes. What you need is a little competition on the buyer side to create leverage from a weak starting position.
Scenario: Insolvent or close to it, but with one asset a buyer genuinely can't get elsewhere. Worth a real conversation before assuming the answer is liquidation.
The plateau sale
Not every sale is dramatic. Sometimes a company just stops growing: not dying, not booming, cash flow positive, going sideways.
That's arguably the hardest exit to force, because there's no urgency on either side. It tends to happen only because a founder personally worked their own network for years until the right buyer, often someone they already knew from a past role or deal, was ready to move.
Returns for investors are usually modest. Still a real outcome, not a failure, and better than either a slow bleed or a wind-down.
Scenario: Growth has flattened, the business is stable but unexciting, no banker or process will manufacture urgency. The founder's own relationships are the only real path, and it can take years.
The soft landing
A company that stops being a venture-scale bet does not need to die or sell.
The right outcome might be founders buying out investors and running the business as what it now actually is: a smaller, sustainable company, not a startup.
Nobody pitched this at Seed stage and nobody writes it up as an exit. But it returns some capital, keeps a real business alive, and lets founders keep something they built instead of watching it sold for parts or wound down.
For investors: unglamorous, not a loss, not a win, just closure with dignity.
The cultivated buyer
The single highest-leverage thing a founder can do is start earlier than feels necessary. The buyers who move fast and pay well rarely come from cold outreach.
They're existing customers or partners the founder has had a real commercial relationship with for months or years before ‘exit’ was ever the word in use. A distribution deal, a pilot, a joint project: these build the trust and internal champions that later let someone at the buyer's company argue for the acquisition from the inside. By the time a founder starts actively looking for a buyer, it's often too late to build that kind of relationship from scratch.
Three more things matter here:
- Consider bringing in a professional. The right M&A advisor can turn a middling opening offer into several multiples more, because founders negotiating their own exit are (understandably) not objective and rarely do this more than once or twice in a career.
- Don't let leverage collapse to a single buyer. Running several conversations in parallel is what gives you power. It’s very similar to fundraising in this sense.
Scenario: Real commercial relationships with companies larger than you: customers, partners, sometimes competitors. Nurture those on their own merits, years before you need an exit. Some will convert into the fastest, best-priced conversations you'll ever have.
The exit that doesn't happen
Most exit-articles stop at the routes that work. The more common outcome for many founders is the one that doesn't. A genuine process, real conversations, real effort, but not enough traction or revenue to create urgency on the buyer side.
We experienced this at Grünfin, even after doing everything I recommend here: talking to founders who'd sold before, building a real pipeline, and timeboxing the search from the start. When it doesn't produce a deal, the company winds down. Investors get some money back, founders get to take a breath and try again.
The core lesson, one that keeps surfacing independently across very different founders: companies aren't bought; they are sold. If nobody has urgency to buy you, no amount of hoping changes that.
The variables you control are how early you start selling, and how honestly you timebox the search against returning capital while there's still capital left to return.
The uncomfortable advice
Telling a founder to spend time on relationships that might someday produce a buyer runs counter to the advice they hear everywhere else: heads down, focus on the customer in front of you. Both pieces of advice are right, which is what makes this hard.
The founders who navigate it best don't treat ‘cultivate the buyer relationship’ as a separate task. They build real partnerships and real customer relationships because those are good for the business anyway, and let the optionality be a side effect, not the point.
Siim Teller is an early-stage tech investor with a focus on impact and B2B startups across the Baltics and Central Eastern Europe. Before stepping into investing, he spent 20 years building several high-growth companies, including Skype and GrabCAD during their formative years. Now a Venture Partner at Norrsken Evolve, an early-stage impact fund from Sweden, and a business mentor for NATO Diana and Creative Destruction Lab startups, he also runs Lemonade Stand, an investment firm that has backed over 45 startups and several VC funds since 2019.
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