The AI start-up that knocked back a $35 million takeover bid

Relume is bootstrapped, meaning it hasn’t taken any outside investment, and has instead been funded by Anisse, Mura and Slater as its sole shareholders.

“Everyone in my non-tech world was saying, ‘That’s a huge amount of money’, because it is,” Anisse said. “I understood where they were coming from, and I’d probably be telling me that too, to be honest.

“But I think what I learned is that the money starts to fade away. Because you buy your house, and you buy your car, and then it kind of becomes a marginal return of happiness.

“After an acquisition you have to figure out, ‘This is my new role, this is my new job’, and the founders I spoke to often [were] not enjoying that job, even though there was often crazy sums of money involved. So I looked at that risk and thought, ‘No, I’m happy now with what I’m doing and so are the team.’ ”

The offers valued the company fairly, according to Anisse, but the decision to knock them back has so far been validated by Relume’s growth numbers. Since the acquisition negotiations, the start-up has doubled its user base, the CEO said, though he did not disclose Relume’s current valuation.

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Australian start-up valuations are well down across the board after the boom of 2021, and are down about 30 per cent from their peaks. That’s leading to what Anisse said would likely be a flurry of acquisitions this year, as companies move to swoop opportunistically on their smaller counterparts.

“It’s acquisition season,” Anisse said. “Start-ups like us are relatively cheaper compared to what we were before. But money is expensive too.

“The negotiations were around three or four months of going back and forth about what the role would actually look like, how we would work inside another company, and what the team structure would look like.

“And even though we said no, to be honest, we’ve still got really good relationships with these companies, and the decision was really just based off the fact that we want to keep building, so I think there’s no hard feelings.

“In hindsight it’s been a good decision so far but we still have a long way to go, obviously.”

The lesson for other technology start-up founders, according to Anisse, is to know why you’re building a company.

“If you’re gunning for an acquisition, there’s genuinely nothing wrong with that,” he said. “But if I’m building for the long-term, that’s very different to building for an exit, and being intentional about which path you’re going down impacts the decision you make today.

“Going through this does make you question yourself, and ask things like ‘who am I?’ We are in this for the long haul, we’re not building something to flip it like a house. That also does attract the right people to work with you, we’re all aligned on this and that makes it more comfortable for us to know we’ve made the right decision.”