Here’s a reason to sell a growing and profitable bootstrapped software company that you don’t hear about:
Your next phase of growth is to expand to a new market, and you know you need major help to do that successfully.
There are still plenty of able buyers who pester SaaS founders to sell their companies.
When you don’t raise big outside funding, you get to choose when—and why—to sell your company to the right partner.
Sharon Nouh built ProSpend, a spend management SaaS platform for mid-market companies, after seeing firsthand how broken expense processes were in corporate travel.
Starting with an expense tool, focused on her home market in Australia, she bootstrapped the company and landed a global enterprise as her first customer with a simple but powerful product vision.
Over 10 years, she expanded ProSpend into a full spend management system covering expenses, accounts payable, purchase orders, and budgets.
The company grew to about 1,000 customers and 50 employees, with annual contracts ranging from roughly $15K to $40K, driven by strong mid-market focus and channel partnerships.
In 2025, Sharon sold ProSpend to ISH (Invincible Software Holdings), a strategic acquirer based in the UK.
She still runs ProSpend but can now accelerate expansion into the UK, with local help from ISH.
After years of staying independent, she chose an acquisition partner over VC funding to maintain control and execute her long-term growth vision, showing how a sale can be a strategic move—not an endpoint.
“A couple of years ago, one of the visions that I had for ProSpend was to expand from Australia into the UK. The UK was always going to be the market that we wanted to move into, rather than the US, because it’s a very aligned, very similar market.
“And also because one of our competitors, WebExpenses, had been bought and sold about four times, and they were the incumbent in the UK. They were suffering. They hadn’t been developing their product. There was a real gap for us to go into the UK and start picking up the mid-market there.
“So the question was, do I get VC funding, even though we’ve always been bootstrapped. Or do I look for an acquiring partner, somebody from the UK who could take us in there with boots on the ground and market intelligence? And I chose the latter and sold the business that I still run.”
Sharon didn’t have to sell ProSpend. She did it to give Prospend the best chances of success in the bigger UK market.
Check out this revealing interview with Sharon Nouh on the Practical Founders Podcast.
