Private equity buys companies, strips out costs, and flips them. A two-year-old startup called Beacon has raised hundreds of millions to do almost the opposite, and to let AI do the heavy lifting.
Beacon, an “AI-native” holding company based in Toronto and San Francisco, said on Tuesday it had raised a $225mn Series C led by General Catalyst and HarbourVest, with Lightspeed, Intrepid Growth Partners, BDT & MSD Partners’ affiliated funds, and others joining. The round takes the company’s total funding past half a billion dollars in barely two years.
Beacon also bolstered its leadership, hiring Mark Schaaf, former chief technology officer of Instacart and Superhuman, as chief operating and product officer, and Goutham Buchi, most recently AngelList’s CTO, as chief technology officer.
Beacon’s model is unusual. It buys small, profitable, often founder-led software companies serving the “everyday economy”, youth sports leagues, campgrounds, manufacturers, unions, the unglamorous vertical software that big venture funds tend to ignore, typically generating under $20mn in annual recurring revenue.
It then rebuilds them on a shared, AI-native platform using an in-house “acceleration team” of engineers and product managers, automating back-office work like accounting and payroll and rewriting the products themselves. It is now acquiring a business roughly once a week, up from once a fortnight a year ago, and says the approach has driven more than 50 per cent EBITDA growth across its portfolio over the past year.