Alexandre Grux

Transcript

In 2017, with Alexis, we created Hyperlex, which is a contract management software for legal professionals. In 2022, we reached a stage where we needed international growth and we felt that either we would need to raise funds to conquer the European market, or we would need to partner with another player, essentially be supported by a strategic partner. We had been approached by several industry players, quite a large number, almost nine companies, who wanted to know if we were for sale and at what price. We weren't experts in this field. So our approach with IPTP was to really entrust them with this part of the process, the discussion with potential buyers and how we would also respond to nine buyers in parallel and create competition, so to speak. Indeed, the nine companies that had come forward to acquire us were interesting, but we were somewhat easy prey for them, so we were advised to go through an investment bank to do some filtering. That's where IPTP did the work, we immediately realized how some offers, or rather some companies, weren't necessarily very serious in their approach, and this saved us money particularly in selecting the main ones that really had something interesting to offer. They had market knowledge, whereas we didn't necessarily know how we could be valued in a certain way relative to the deals. IPTP, having already worked with several companies in their deal flow, had exactly the right understanding of how to present us. So from the start, they helped us by reasonably saying, based on what we know about buyers, what we know about your technology, here's a price that seems reasonable to us. So I think that was already the fair price, independent of the competitive process, independent of external solicitations. IPTP helped us a lot in verbalizing what were deal-breakers for us in the choice and what were important expectations for us. It's not just a financial choice, they truly understood the logic of what we wanted to do afterward. And since they were entrepreneurs themselves, they also knew what we were looking for. They repeatedly asked us what we wanted, what our mission was, what we wanted to do next. This was important and it also guided us not to just take the offer from the first person who comes along with a number but who might destroy everything we needed. They were dedicated to this process, they maintained the pace, kept the schedule, moved discussions forward where I think at several points we might have even lost quite important and relevant buyers just because we were neglecting them in terms of timing. And they refused certain offers without even talking to us because they judged them to be completely off the mark. It was very far from what they considered to be the fair price and that was also very practical. Otherwise, we would have had to take the offer, tell the buyer that no, it's not possible. Yes, it's unpleasant because it's true that at times there are offers, we don't really know if they'll succeed or not, but we feel it's going to be endless negotiations and it's going to fail. This was practical because in the end, especially when the merger happens, we don't have that liability, we're not spectators, we're not the people responsible for these challenges or rejections of offers at a price that was perhaps too low. For the merger, the interesting part was that it wasn't the end of the story for Hyperlex and for us as entrepreneurs since we reinvested in Dilitrust, we now hold C-level positions at Dilitrust and we continue and participate in the company's development, along with all our team members who were able to join the organization in positions of responsibility and bring their talents to Dilitrust's development.