Simply
Aügmented
Better transparency, cost assessment accuracy and employee sentiment for tech acquisitions
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Better transparency, cost assessment accuracy and employee sentiment for tech acquisitions
With over 20 years of supporting both tech startups and investment buyers through the M&A process, it quickly became clear to us that any tech acquisition strategy requires diligence support beyond Quality of Earnings analysis.
Augmented has developed a three-phase support that identifies the critical areas of the product that can benefit from AI automation, augments the strategic decisions with a product/technology diligence report, and provides the staff transition surety plan.
These services are designed to provide risk mitigation, objective evaluation, and the opportunity to make more informed investment decisions. We aim to contribute significantly to a smoother and more successful sales process by providing credibility, expertise, and enhanced transparency.
76% of technology acquisitions fail to meet their financial objectives. Augmented looks to both people and technology as critical parts of the pre-acquisition diligence during the Deal Screening stage of the M&A process.
System Robustness: evaluate the software's architecture to ensure that it can handle various challenges and meet the required performance, scalability, reliability, and security standards.
Digital Transformation Potential: look beyond financials to assess the operational efficiency of technology systems through the lens of AI automation. This includes evaluating development processes and operational workflows to identify areas for improvement and optimization.
Integration Challenges: particularly related to rollup or strategic acquisition, buyers should understand potential integration issues during the post-acquisition stage, including technical and staff compatibility and alignment.
In a 2023 study by the Wharton School of Business, 33% of acquired employees leave post-acquisition. In a merger scenario, this can lead to delayed integration, disruption of services, or additional churn in the customer base.
Armed with both enterprise change management and feature/system integration experience, the Augmented Integration Surety team is uniquely positioned to mitigate flight risk and provide neutral bridges in cultural conflicts:
De-risk against service interruption: by absorbing deep product knowledge, the Augmented team can provide temporary staff to ensure business continuity if the target company experiences high exit during integration.
Maximize value through neutrality: as a third party, the Augmented team acts as a moderation party to help evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of product features. This neutrality may remove bias and accelerate joint value creation.
Augmented has dedicated the last 20 years to transforming enterprises through data science, machine learning, and practical AI automation. Our value creation strategies are centered around the following:
Improve customer success: from customer service automation to ad campaign optimizations, Augmented team has utilized both natural language processing and generative AI to improve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Optimize sales and lead generation: by combining lead scoring, outreach automation and sales forecasting, the Augmented services can help capture previously underserved market. In addition, AI algorithms may optimize ad campaigns and spending, including dynamic A/B testing through AI content generation.
Unlock blue ocean strategy: create uncontested market space by innovating and creating new demand in healthcare, renewable energy, manufacturing, human resources, and more.
Each acquisition is different. Regardless where you are in your journey, Augmented has identified and aggregated the talents and experience to provide the support of resources and skillsets for each unique challenge.
Better transparency, cost assessment accuracy and employee sentiment for tech acquisitions
Modern Hire (MH) had grappled with the complexities of modernizing the technology stack with a rapidly diminishing developer community interest. Before the acquisition, Modern Hire engaged the Augmented team to identify and implement product improvements that could meaningfully boost valuation.
In June of 2022, Augmented team started the collaboration with Modern Hire’s internal team. The initial audit found that the internal documentation, and security standards were outstanding.
However, the lack of QA automation and legacy technology choices would increase friction in future feature releases and external integration efforts. In addition, the Augmented team also identified a specific AI automation opportunity that could both improve brand loyalty and reduce cost of customer service by 75%.
Over the course of 6 months, our team divided its attention into two separate categories: digital transformation and AI injection.
Augmented efficiently translated the codebase from Angular to React, created both frontend end-to-end test, improved backend unit test coverage, revamped the API layer, and transitioned the CI/CD framework from an home-brew solution to an enterprise suite.
The Augmented team also undertook a comprehensive overhaul of the user experience of customer-facing features. These improvements impacted every end user on the platform, leading to a boost in engagement and retention by estimated 130%.
The AI team’s integrated natural language processing into an SMS-based system with renewed end-user experience. This AI automation provided an immediate boost in customer success and cost-savings.
Modern Hire was acquired by HireVue in May of 2023. This Aügmented initiative not only played a pivotal role in Modern Hire’s acquisition, it also unlocked hidden values that boosted its valuation.
In 2017, FlowJo joined BD (Becton, Dickinson & Company), a global medical technology company advancing the world of health by improving medical discovery, diagnostics, and the delivery of care.
Post-acquisition, the system architect left FlowJo due to the difference in technology and business-direction decisions. This triggered a small exodus, destabilizing the e-commerce and product licensing development team.
FlowJo’s payment model was also transitioning from annual billing to monthly subscription. The severity of the staff issue was compounded by the fact that BD, the parent company, could not support a subscription model easily due to the internal legacy software choices.
FlowJo engaged the Augmented team amid the high volatility to reduce friction to provide business continuity.
Within the first 12 months, our team accomplished major initiatives on multiple fronts:
Automate license renewal and new purchases: given that the parent company could not provide subscription capabilities, the Augmented team extended the subscription model to the end user and increased overall sales by 65%.
Standardize financial reporting to parent company's internal requirements: knowing the parent company's frequency and requirements, the Augmented team eliminated the complexity of manual reporting.
In 2018, the FlowJo team extended the project scope behind internal integration work. Over the next 4 years, the Augmented team collaborated with the parent company to build out a category-defining software that eventually debuted in late 2022.
This Aügmented initiative not only played a pivotal role in FlowJo's integration efforts but also rocketed them into an innovation leadership position in their industry.
Powur PBC has a simple vision. It wants to become the next Uber in the residential solar space and a marketplace that connects homeowners and installers. In early 2020, it was valued at over 400 million, but its growth was hindered by one key vendor a rooftop solar proposal platform that estimates savings and payments to homeowners.
The vendor was costing Powur over 3 million dollars a year in direct labor and licensing fee. More importantly, it could not connect seamlessly with Powur’s internal ERP without exposing pricing that may be adversarial to the installers.
As a part of the long-term partnership, Powur engaged the Augmented team to explore ways to gain dependency and reduce vulnerability from the external platform. And the Augmented team did just that.
Within the first 12 months, our team implemented computer vision to detect roof structure and inclination and extract roof areas from aerial satellite images.
By collecting the cost of labor and installation and the utility consumption pattern from the homeowners, the application also creates a 10, 15, 20, and 25-year statistical forecast to illustrate the long-term economic impact of the installation.
The most complex aspect of this project was to provide optimal pricing based on installers' availability and solar panel inventories' pricing. The success of this project required deep integrations with Power's ERP, project management, and communication software to provide accurate predictions of consumption and demand.
Powur's journey was fraught with challenges such as evolving business models, adapting to new customer experiences, and pivoting user roles to capture additional market share.
The Aügmented team acted as CTO and CPO in front of the investors during fundraising and even directly supported their growing customer base.