SaaS Group Never Buys Without the Cash. That Rule Built $60M in ARR.
Twenty acquisitions, $60M of combined ARR and 300 people, assembled by a buyer who has never signed a deal before the money was already in the bank. Tim Schumacher on debt lines, 2–4x multiples and buying out of bankruptcy.
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The first deal was signed with his own money. In 2018 Tim Schumacher bought DeployBot outright — no financing contingency, no raise to close, just cash from two prior exits sitting in an account. The second acquisition went the same way. Six years later he owns 20 SaaS companies doing $60,000,000 of ARR between them, and the rule that governed the first cheque still governs every one since. “We never buy a business where we don’t have the funds,” he told Nathan Latka. “That would be a search fund, or be something where people have to go out to get funding. But we always have the money ready in the bank.”
That is worth sitting with, because it inverts how almost every other buyer in this market operates. The GetLatka record for SaaS Group carries the same headline figure — $60,000,000 in revenue — but dates it to 1 January 2024 and flags it an estimate. The tape upgrades it: in June 2024 Latka read the number back to Schumacher, along with 20 businesses and 300 people, and asked whether all of it was still accurate. “Yeah. That’s still accurate.”
The financing comes first, and everything else falls out of it. A buyer who already has the money can pay two to four times revenue instead of eight, can insist on owning 100% instead of a controlling slice, and never has to underwrite an exit date. Churn, thin margins, even an insolvency administrator on the other side of the table become price inputs rather than deal-breakers — because nothing about the deal depends on selling the company again later.
Three sources of money, all of them lined up early
Schumacher is a German investor and entrepreneur who co-founded the domain marketplace Sedo and eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus. The dividends from that second business, rather than a single windfall, were what funded DeployBot. His self-assessment for why he became a buyer at all is unusually flat: “I’m actually not the best person from zero to one, so starting a business, MVP, all of that. There are much better people than me. But I’m pretty good from one to 10, so scaling a business.” Latka’s introduction put the target range at $1M to $10M in revenue.
By 2024 the balance sheet had three taps, and Schumacher listed them in order of how they arrived.
- A committed debt line — providers gave SaaS Group a credit line to draw against for acquisitions, and as long as a target sits inside the agreed area and metrics, a deal needs a capital call rather than an approval.
- Operating cash flow — the portfolio is run for a 20–30% profit margin, and what piles up at the parent funds the next purchase.
- One equity round — about $25,000,000, the first external equity SaaS Group had ever taken, sold for a single-digit percentage of the parent.
The equity round is the odd one out, and Schumacher was candid that he did not need the cash so much as the phone numbers. He would not name the investors, describing them as successful SaaS entrepreneurs and one lead alongside a lot of individuals — explicitly not a fund writing a single cheque. What he wanted was people a few years further down the same road: “There’s one guy who does a roll-up not in a competing space, but software. And he’s just kind of three, four years ahead of us. With 300 people, he’s like a thousand people. Revenue is also threefold. He went through all the stuff we still have to go through.”
What two to four times revenue actually buys
Asked whether the all-cash portion of his recent deals typically landed between two and four times, Schumacher agreed without hedging: some a little lower, some a little higher, but the majority sits in that band. Eight or nine times — the range Latka attributed to larger private-equity buyers — he says he has paid exactly once, on a very small deal that was growing fast and had strategic importance.
He is also structurally the opposite of the private-equity comparison, and drew the line himself.
Takes a significant minority or a majority, improves the business, and flips it about three years later. The return comes from the improvements plus the leverage in the deal structure — which means an exit has to exist for the model to work.
Buys 100%, every time, and intends to run the business indefinitely. No fund, no fund lifetime, no seven-to-ten-year clock, no SPVs — everything is bought on the parent’s own balance sheet, sometimes with equity and sometimes with debt.
The model he names is Constellation Software, the Canadian public company whose founder Mark Leonard both he and Latka read closely. Preserving what was there is part of the pitch: keep the name, keep the founder’s legacy, keep what made the company strong, fill the holes. Where founders want upside beyond the cheque, it comes through an earnout or a bonus rather than a minority stake — and the earnout, he says, is really a question about the seller. He wants to know the real reason someone is selling, whether burnout, a founder conflict, or taking chips off the table, because that answer governs the structure. Some sellers hand over the keys and are gone in four weeks; some are still there three years later. Seller financing shows up too: a guaranteed payment that lands a year or two out, which saves SaaS Group interest and lets it pay a little more.
Churn gets priced, not vetoed
The clearest evidence that this is an underwriting posture rather than a marketing line is what SaaS Group has been willing to buy. DashThis, which Latka interviewed in January 2022, was reporting 36% gross annual logo churn at the time, with 2,600 customers, a $440 customer acquisition cost against $135 a month in revenue per customer, and about $50,000 a month going into paid marketing. UserSnap, on the show in April 2018, was running about 26% gross annual churn. Both are now inside the portfolio.
“All of that gets factored into the price, but we’ve seen businesses with more churn than that.”
Tim Schumacher, founder, SaaS Group
His argument is that some categories churn by design — seasonal products, or tools sold to agencies that themselves go out of business — and that logo churn on its own is the wrong number to stare at. What matters alongside it is dollar churn, which smart upselling can move even when the logo count keeps leaking. Profitability gets the same treatment. He will not require a 30% margin on day one, only the potential to get there: he has bought a business where a single founder was doing all the work at a 95% margin, and he has bought insanely unprofitable ones.
Two of them came out of bankruptcy
Two portfolio companies were bought from insolvency administrators rather than from founders — one out of a French bankruptcy, one, Zenloop, out of a German one. The mechanics are unfamiliar to most buyers: an administrator is charged with selling the assets, so the negotiation happens with that person, with far more formality and no founder across the table. Latka put Zenloop’s venture history at roughly €10,000,000 — about €4.8M raised in 2019 and 6.1 in 2020 — and asked what happened to it. Schumacher: “They only got a dime of the dollar.” SaaS Group now owns the company outright.
Latka also read out what Zenloop’s CEO had said in January 2023 about the liquidation: “We were not able to get the required approval in a short amount of time. Unfortunately, that can happen with a large group of more than 40 shareholders.” Schumacher’s reading of both failures is that the software was never the problem. “Bankruptcies are pretty rare in SaaS, because if you manage the SaaS well, it’s almost impossible to get it into bankruptcy. Usually only happens if there’s a VC pouring in too much money, founders go crazy, the environment tanks.” In both cases the businesses were restructured — one kept its founder, one got new management — and both, he says, are profitable and growing again.
The value-add is narrow and unglamorous
Ask what a holding company actually does to a business after it buys it and the honest answer here is: puts a specialist on one channel. At DashThis, the team that had been proud of its paid marketing found its Google budget cut in half — and the output doubled, which Schumacher describes as a fourfold improvement in lead generation from that account alone. The customer acquisition payback that ran about five months at the time of Latka’s 2022 interview now runs two and a half.
Growth after acquisition is uneven and he does not pretend otherwise. He names Scraper API, Rewardful and Prerender as the standouts, with a handful of companies growing four or five times over roughly three years of ownership, and one going from $2M to $10M after purchase — not Rewardful, he corrected, when Latka guessed. Others have been flat, which he treats as a function of what was paid rather than a failure: buy a flat business, improve it a little, and that is what the price reflected.
Where the record and the tape disagree
SaaS Group is a holding company, which makes its metrics harder to read than a single product’s. GetLatka’s dated rows tell a story that only partly lines up with the June 2024 conversation.
- Dec 2021 · Headcount 27 people.
- Dec 2022 · Headcount 46 people.
- Oct 2023 · Headcount 71 people.
- Jan 2024 · Revenue and headcount $60,000,000 and 300 people — both rows flagged estimates.
- Jan 2024 · Funding a $25,000,000 round, the only funding row on file.
- Jun 2024 · On tape 20 companies, $60,000,000 of ARR, 300 people, confirmed by Schumacher.
Two gaps are worth stating plainly. The first is headcount: the three measured rows climb 27 to 46 to 71 and then jump to 300 in a single quarter, on a row the database itself marks as an estimate. Schumacher’s 300 counts everyone across 20 separate companies; what the earlier rows were counting is not recorded, and the two series may simply not be measuring the same thing. The second is the equity round. The database books the $25,000,000 to 1 January 2024; on the tape Schumacher twice describes it as having closed “earlier this year”, in 2024. One of those is wrong, and the tape is the primary source.
The revenue figure carries the same caveat in reverse. As a database row it is an estimate dated December 2023; as an annual run rate confirmed by the person who owns all 20 companies, in June 2024, it is about as good as a private number gets. It is also, importantly, a sum rather than a curve — 20 businesses mostly bought between $1M and $10M of revenue, some grown four or five times since, some flat, one restructured out of insolvency.
For a man who buys other people’s finished companies, his answer to Latka’s closing question — what he wishes he had known at 20 — is fitting enough.
“I should’ve spent one more year partying at university. I was finished too quick, started my whole first company too quick. And so in retrospect, maybe just adding one more year just for fun would not have been a bad thing.”
Tim Schumacher, founder, SaaS Group
Sources — Tim Schumacher interviewed by Nathan Latka, “The Micro PE Playbook: They Bought 20 SaaS Companies, $60m ARR, 300 people”, recorded June 2024 and posted that August; the GetLatka company database (dated revenue, headcount and funding rows for SaaS Group, with the January 2024 revenue and 300-person rows flagged as estimates); Latka’s earlier interviews with DashThis, January 2022, and UserSnap, April 2018, for the churn and acquisition-cost figures; Zenloop’s CEO on the January 2023 liquidation, quoted on the tape.
