Alpine SG (ASG), a portfolio company of private equity firm Alpine Investors, which buys and builds vertical SaaS companies, recently announced another acquisition: Sierra Interactive. The latter is a proptech firm that manages lead generation for real estate companies.
“This year marks our 16th in business,” Sierra Founder, Ben Peskoe, was quoted in a press release. We have grown steadily throughout that time, but over the past five years our growth has accelerated. With that growth, we began to get a real sense of the huge opportunities in front of us — as well as the challenges that would come along with them.”
ASG doesn’t integrate offerings from acquisitions into a single product platform as many software companies do. Instead, backed by Alpine Investors, it is a general software-as-a-service, or SaaS, company. ASG claims to operate more than 45 businesses in eight different verticals, including finance, HR, legal technology, and engineering, that it has acquired over time. The integration, as it were, would come through operations. By providing software delivery systems and business processes and mechanisms to enable the SaaS companies to operate more efficiently, reducing overall costs.
Sierra is an additional expansion of ASG into commercial real estate software. Last month, DoorLoop announced that it had raised $20 million in a Series-A funding round. ASG backed the investment. The ultimately goal of the DoorLoop founders may have been acquisition. “DoorLoop’s co-founders, CEO Ori Tamuz and CMO David Bitton, are no strangers to ASG,” a press release said at the time. “They co-founded PracticePanther, a law practice management software, that was acquired by ASG in 2018.”
What seems likely is that ASG is attempting to build its own collection of real estate-associated packages That would offer the chance of an industrial sector in CRE, with the potential for cross-selling and more efficient marketing.
In the past, when niche industry software was developed and sold by companies that worked with networks of specialist computer and network integrators, such an approach would have been next to impossible. Now, with cloud-delivered solutions that are developed and maintained centrally, then distributed through Internet access, the concept seems natural. And, as ASG says on its website, these individual businesses don’t fit the profiles that venture capital or private equity firms usually seek.