Evotix Hit $17M ARR on $11M Raised, Eleven Years After Matt Ellison Bought It for a Dollar

In 2011 a secondary fund was working its way out of a stack of distressed assets, and one of them was a small British safety-software company called SHE Software. It had about 200 customers paying roughly $2,000 a year, something like $400,000 of annual revenue, and a commercial dispute with its largest customer — the one that had, in the company’s telling, taken its solution and gone off to build its own. The fund was near the end of its life. Nobody else wanted the lawsuit.

The fund was near end of life. They needed to be rid of the company, and nobody else wanted to take on that risk.

Matt Ellison, an interim chief executive between jobs with no background in health and safety software at all, bought it for a dollar.

The dollar deal

Buying the risk nobody else wanted

Ellison was not hunting. He had been an interim chief exec, the business he was running had been sold, and the partners in the fund behind it asked him what came next.

I’ve always been on the lookout for business to buy without super actively searching … and so I bought it for the proverbial dollar, because it was very much a turnaround.

The seller matters more than the price. Ellison described it precisely on tape: “this particular fund was a secondary fund, so what they’ve done is they bought a whole stack of assets from a distressed purchase, and they were trying to work through them and figure out what they were doing with them.” A fund at the end of its life holding an asset it cannot clean up is a seller with no leverage — and Latka pushed him on how a listener would find one. Ellison declined to claim expertise there, beyond networking around the industry.

1. Find the fund, not the company. A secondary fund near end of life, holding assets it bought distressed and has to work through, is the structural condition that makes a dollar a real price.
2. Take the asset with the liability attached. Evotix’s biggest customer had, Ellison says, taken its solution and developed its own software — “arguably taking the IP and certainly breaking the contract” — and was suing. “We were being sued for 11 million dollars by our largest customer.”
3. Settle the risk yourself, and get paid for it. “Well, we sued them, and then it went to a mediation, and we faced them down across the table, and they paid us three hundred thousand dollars.” Latka’s read on tape: that is a seed round — but with no equity given up.

$1what Ellison paid in 2011 for 200 customers, about $400,000 of revenue and an $11m lawsuit

From $2,000 a customer to $25,000

The 200 customers he inherited were paying an average of about $2,000 a year. By July 2022 Evotix had between four and five hundred customers at an average annual contract value of around $25,000. That is not the same book of business revalued upward; a lot of it was replaced.

There were some uneconomic customers clearly when I acquired the business, and so we very much focused on the customers that we thought could kind of draw true value from the solution.

GetLatka’s company record dates every rung of that ladder: $400,000 in July 2011, $1m in July 2014, $5m in December 2018, $9.6m in July 2021, $14m in July 2022, $17m in January 2023 and $47m in December 2024. Ellison put the first million at “probably 2014, I would think, something like that” — three years after the purchase. The software itself is much older than any of it: SHE Software launched in 1995 by his account, GetLatka’s record says 1996, and it had passed through several owners before he got to it. He rebranded it Evotix in October 2021.

The number was in pounds

When Ellison came back on in January 2023 — the tape has both men wishing each other a happy new year, and Ellison correcting himself mid-answer because the calendar had turned — the headline figure nearly went into the record wrong. He gave it in sterling. “We will end our financial year on about 15 million of sterling of ARR,” he said, and when Latka asked directly whether that was pounds or dollars: “15 million pounds.” At that week’s exchange rate it converted to about $17m, which Ellison confirmed. The growth rate was 40%, from “just over 10” million pounds a year earlier.

Six months earlier he had told Latka the business was doing more than $12m; asked in January what July’s number had actually been, he was unambiguous: “I think July may have been 14 million dollars; I’m now saying 15 million pounds.” The 12 months to July 2022 had grown 43%. Two consecutive years above 40%, stated by the founder, is what these two tapes support — the longer arc is in the dated rows above, not in a number he gave.

Headcount moved far less than revenue. GetLatka’s record has 92 people in December 2018, 96 in December 2019, 116 in December 2020, 147 in December 2021, 150 in July 2022 and 160 in January 2023: ten hires between the two interviews, while the run rate went from $14m to $17m.

Where the growth came from

Almost all of it was new logos. Expansion was real but secondary — and Latka pulled it apart on tape rather than accepting the headline. Ellison put net retention at “110, 115”; asked what sat underneath that, he said the company was seeing gross churn of about 5% a year, with expansion of 15% and up.

Net dollar retention = gross retention + expansionEllison’s January 2023 figures: about 5% gross churn a year, expansion of 15% and up, 110–115% net.

The interesting part is the org chart behind those two numbers. Evotix split them onto different teams, deliberately.

What we found was that we were picking up the smaller upsells but we weren’t driving the big expansion deals, and so I’ve got a team now who are more hunters.

Latka’s gloss for the audience was blunter than Ellison’s: do not hand a customer success rep a 120% retention target, hand them a couple of accounts and tell them to double the contract value by selling into a new division. In July 2022 the whole sales and marketing function was about 50 people, with 11 new-business quota carriers and three on expansion.

Engagement is the product, and the operating system

Ask Ellison what Evotix sells and he does not open with modules. Both times, he interrupted the feature list to get to the same point.

The key thing is about engaging employees, because you only get so far with health and safety with rules and procedures. So it’s all about engaging your employees.

Matt Ellison, CEO, Evotix

That is the purpose behind it, and he states it as a number: “how can it be acceptable that in European and North American workplaces we’re still killing 5,000 people a year, and it’s mostly from causes which are well understood and easily preventable?” The target customer is an organisation of 250 to 10,000 employees — he put the sweet spot at 500 to 10,000 in July — typically still running health and safety on pen, paper and Excel. Occasionally the customer is far larger: Network Rail, a UK business of a hundred thousand employees, has all of them on the platform. Manufacturing is the biggest vertical at about 20% of revenue, followed by construction, transport and logistics, food and drink, retail, municipalities and housing.

The engagement thesis is also the upsell engine. The initial purchase is usually a narrow set of functionality — incidents, risk, audits — and the modules follow.

• People and training, assets, contractors — the modular catalogue customers buy into after the first deal.
• Learn — the module Ellison named as the biggest upsell driver over the six months to January 2023, embedding rich content inside day-to-day activity instead of the classroom-and-quiz LMS experience.
• Micro video in the workflow — “imagine how much more engaging and compelling that is if I go to the machine with my tablet, I scan a QR code, it shows me some video and some diagrams, I do an online quiz, I do a point of work risk assessment, I do my lockout tagout, and off I go.”

Which is also why it holds: “that makes the solution very sticky, because it’s an operational solution and not just a sort of a compliance solution, as some people might think of safety.” Ellison runs his own company on the same premise — a half-hour, all-hands town hall every two weeks, new joiners, birthdays and anniversaries called out, high fives logged in 15Five, which was his answer both times Latka asked for a favourite tool. Marketing runs on the same instinct: the company has its own podcast, Two Bald Guys Talking Safety, which he described as a great initiative with a serious message and a growing following.

Six months from breakeven

By January 2023 interest rates had moved four points and the equity markets had effectively shut, and Latka wanted to know what that did to a company still burning cash.

We’re slightly cash burning, but very much controlled — and obviously in the current environment we’re very much keeping an eye on that.

He first said cash breakeven “by the middle of next year,” then corrected himself on air: January had arrived, so it meant the middle of that same year, 2023. Asked whether the net burn rate was nearer a hundred grand a month or a million, he said the hundred grand; Latka’s own framing on the episode was $100,000 to $200,000 net a month, and GetLatka’s record carries a cash-flow figure of minus $200,000. Ellison would not answer the runway question in months, because he did not think it applied: “given that our cash burn is declining, we’ve got enough cash to go through to break even, so in that sense the burn rate isn’t an issue.” There were no term sheets and no raise planned.

We’re not one of those two or three hundred percent growth but burn a lot of cash businesses.

Matt Ellison, CEO, Evotix

The same discipline shut down the obvious question a dealmaker gets asked in a downturn. Latka wanted to know whether he was rolling up other EHS companies. He was not: “we’re not fundamentally looking at sort of an industry consolidation play, because I think the technical integration, you know, it is a big diversion. It’s a tough job already growing a company fast without facing that.” The only acquisitions on the table were small technical ones — two- or three-person teams, part acquihire, particularly around image recognition. Latka closed the episode calling it the definition of controlled growth, not irresponsible all-out growth burning millions per month.

What the record says now

Four months after that conversation, on 2 May 2023, SAI360 — a portfolio company of the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group — announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Evotix. Terms were not disclosed. The announcement put Evotix at almost 500 customers in mid-market and lower-enterprise manufacturing, retail, food and beverage and housing, against SAI360’s own base of global enterprises in mining and metals, energy, utilities and construction.

The database has moved a long way past the tape since. The most recent revenue row on the Evotix company profile is $47m, recorded December 2024, alongside 280 staff on the same date — against the $17m and 160 people Ellison stated in January 2023. That row is dated well after the SAI360 announcement, and nothing in the record says whether it measures the same perimeter Ellison was describing; the last revenue figure he gave on the podcast is the £15m one.

Two other fields need their dates read with them. The $50m valuation on the profile is the Series B post-money from 2020, not a current mark: GetLatka’s funding rows are a $6m Series A in July 2018 at a $25m valuation and a $5m Series B in July 2020 at $50m, $11m in total. Ellison’s own account was more granular — the A came in two $3m tranches, one closing in 2018 and one in 2019, the first at a valuation of about $12m and the second higher — and in July 2022 he put the company “north of 100 million,” immediately adding “subject of course to where we are in the markets at the moment.” Through all of it he stayed, in his words, the largest shareholder but slightly below majority.

Latka asked him both times what he wished he had known at twenty, and both times he gave a version of the same answer — which is roughly the answer you would expect from a man whose best deal arrived because he happened to be standing there when a fund needed a way out.

I think that, you know, there’s no need to rush things. You build your experience over time, you keep your eye open for opportunities, and that’s how it all comes together.

Sources Nathan Latka’s interviews with Matt Ellison, recorded July 2022 and January 2023; the GetLatka company record for Evotix (revenue, team size, funding and cash-flow rows, each dated above); SAI360’s announcement of its intent to acquire Evotix, 2 May 2023.