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How to Find Companies that are Likely to Exit
How to Find Companies that are Likely to Exit

Predictive searches for companies that are looking to be acquired or IPO, and how to find the key people at these firms

Updated over 2 months ago

Contents

  1. Link to Webinar Recording from February 2025

  2. Search Templates

  3. Executive Summary

  4. Tweaks to add to searches

  5. Methodology and Data

  6. Patents Footnote

  7. Get in touch + Similar Articles

Watch our Webinar recording from February 2025:

Recording:

Search Templates:

Finding Companies

Executive Summary

A brief summary of the findings and reasoning for the search templates

Companies that acquired another company in 2024 commonly:

  • Have scaled up (in either headcount or turnover), been mentioned in a high growth list, and had some form of equity or debt funding

  • Were based in the United Kingdom (particularly the South of England) or the United States

  • Had over 100 employees, turnover of over £30M, and over £1M in EBITDA, Operating Profit and Cash

  • Were valued at over £10M, and have received over £6M in equity funding

Companies that were acquired by another company in 2024 commonly:

  • Were based in the South of England or the North West

  • Had over £15M in revenue, but headcount varied greatly from a median of 22 to an average of 88.

  • Were valued at around £2.5-£3M, and for those who have received funding, they received around £1M.


Companies that have IPO'd since 2021 were commonly:

  • Receiving 3 or more fundraisings ahead of their exit - often totalling in excess of £10M

  • Valued at over £15M, with the mean average exceeding £250M, likely fuelled by the 4 companies valued at £1B+

  • Employing over 70 people, but this ranged greatly, and be turning over at least £10M

  • Surprisingly, EBITDA, Net Worth, R&D Expenditure and Grants received all varied greatly, to such a point where they seem to have played no large role in the company's image ahead of IPO.


Tweaks + Additional Criteria

These are potential ways that you can narrow down your searches to a cohort of companies that are more prevalent to the work you're undertaking.

Often, these elements may make a company more likely to be involved in an exit event.

Methodology behind searches

The below is data taken from the Beauhurst platform, upon which the search templates have been built upon.


IPOs

The underlying data looks at all IPO events from the start of January 2021 until the end of January 2025.

Metric to 3sf

Mean
Median

2021-January 2025 Analysis of IPOs
(74 exits)

Latest Post-Money Valuation

£263m
£16.9m

No. of Fundraisings Received

3.86
3

Total Amount received in fundraisings

£76.7m
£9.57m

Amount Received in latest fundraising

£18.7m
£1.35m

Turnover

£71.8m
£11.2m

Number of Employees

271

72

EBITDA

-£1.1m
-£257k

Cash

£63.6m
£1.88m

Acquisitions

The underlying data looks at all acquisitions in 2024 between January 1st and the 15th of November and covers 1184 acquired companies and 997 acquiring companies.

* Non-UK companies will not be filing financial accounts to Companies House!
** Companies that have not hit £10.2M in turnover are not required to file full accounts to Companies House, so some fields like Turnover or EBITDA may not be filed by all UK companies

Mean
Median
All to 3sf

Acquiring Companies

Acquired Companies

Number of Accounts Filed*

682

1171

Turnover**

£613M
£33M

£38.0M
£18.2M

Operating Profit

£43.7M
£1.76M

£1.87M
£1.31M

EBITDA**

£66.3M
£3.09M

£2.86M
£1.93M

Cash

£45.3M
£1.37M

£1.63M
£280,000

Number of Employees

2450
134

80.6
22.0

* Non-UK companies will not be filing financial accounts to Companies House!
** Companies that have not hit £10.2M in turnover are not required to file full accounts to Companies House, so some fields like Turnover or EBITDA may not be filed by all UK companies

Funding Analysis

Mean
Median

Acquiring Companies

Acquired Companies

Latest pre-money valuation

£181M
£11.1M

£14.5M
£2.62M

Latest post-money valuation

£192M
£13.4M

£16.1M
£3.43M

Latest Turnover multiples following the most recent fundraising

29.7
1.79

28.8
1.79

Number of grants received

0.31
0

0.13
0

Total amount received in grants

£1.09M

£139,000

£567,000
£179,000

Number of fundraisings completed

0.823
0

0.512
0

Total amount received in fundraisings

£52.2M
£6.86M

£4.05M
£922,000


Non-Financial Analysis

Signs of growth, innovation and risk

For more information on this, read this page about our Signals!

Signal

Number of companies with the signal
% of companies with this signal

All numbers to 3sf

Acquiring Companies

Acquired Companies

Equity Fundraising

245
24.6%

221
18.5%

Debt Fundraising

43
4.31%

14
1.17%

MBO/MBI

97
9.73%

34
2.84%

Accelerator

48
4.81%

46
3.85%

10% Scaleup

381
38.2%

349
29.2%

20% Scaleup

287
28.79%

212
17.7%

High Growth List

255
25.6%

142
11.9%

Academic Spinout

1
0.10%

6
0.50%

R&D Grant

25
2.51%

29
2.42%

Patent

42
4.21%

22
2.42%

Liquidation and insolvency

4
0.40%

26
1.84%

CCJ

11
1.10%

7
0.59%

Short Cash Runway

50
5.02%

0
0%

Down Round

11
1.10%

13
1.09%


Most common auditors

Acquiring Companies Top 10

Acquired Companies Top 10

BDO, 37

RSM UK Audit - 15 mentions

Azets Audit Services, 16

Azets Audit Services - 12 mentions

Deloitte, 16

PWC - 8 mentions

PWC, 15

Cooper Parry - 8 mentions

EY, 14

Grant Thornton - 7 mentions

Grant Thornton, 14

BDO - 7 mentions

RSM UK Audit, 14

CLA Evelyn Partners - 6 mentions

KPMG, 12

Forvis Mazars - 6 mentions

Hazlewoods, 8

Hazlewoods - 5 mentions

Johnston Carmichael, 7

KPMG - 4 mentions

Most common headquarters location

  • On a country level, 71.2% of the Acquiring companies are based in the United Kingdom, followed by the United States (11.9%), Germany (3.8%) and France (1.9%)

  • For the UK-based acquiring companies, 26.7% are based in London, followed by the South East (14.2%), then the North West (12.3%), and Yorkshire and The Humber (7.8%).
    Scotland represented 5.7% of companies, whilst Wales and Northern Ireland represented 4.2% and 1.2% respectively.

  • As for Acquired companies, 31.1% were headquartered in London, followed by the South East (13.1%), North West (9.1%) and the South West (6.8%).

Tracking Status

  • Of the Acquiring companies, 48.5% are Tracked, 45.3% are Not Tracked, and 6.1% are Ceased Tracking

Patents Footnote:

Of the 74 IPOs, 12 companies have an active patent (16%).
Whilst this is a relatively small sample size, the companies with at least one active patent, when compared to those without, saw greater valuations, market capitalisations, number and value of funding received.

Equally, they exited with a lesser turnover, EBITDA, cash in bank and number of employees - one could take from this that the presence of an active patent reduced the barrier to exit and helped increase the company's valuation.

If you haven't yet got access to Beauhurst's Patent data, speak to your Account Manager!

Metric

Mean
Median
All to 3sf

Those with patents

Those without patents

How many times greater is this metric for companies with patents, compared to those without?

Pre-Money Valuation

£450M
£65.0M

£191M

£10.0M

2.36
6.50

Post-Money Valuation

£490M
£102M

£205M
£13.7M

2.39
7.48

IPO market capitalisations

£635M
£119M

£314M
£74.9M

2.02
1.60

Number of fundraisings received

7.33
6.50

3.19
2.00

2.30
3.25

Total amount of fundraising received

£161M
£22.2M

£56.9M

£7.9M

2.84
2.81

Turnover

£39.7M
£5.29M

£77.8M
£11.8M

0.51
0.45

Pre-tax profit

-£22.9M
-£8.98M

-£1.76M
-£290k

13.0
31.0

EBITDA

-£17.7M
-£4.79M

£2.03M

-£3,260

-8.72

1,470

Cash

£38.0M

£2.37M

£68.7M
£1.88M

0.55
1.26

Number of Employees

215
82.5

284

71.5

0.76

1.15

👋Get in touch with the team

For any more information on how to run similar searches yourself, what kind of data Beauhurst has, or how you can run similar analysis, please speak to your Support team - their contact details will be found in the Help tab on your account.

👀Also check out:

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