Aptean, a private equity-owned maker of industry software for manufacturers and distributors, made 59 completed acquisitions of software companies from 2015 to 2025 in our records, from listed companies down to small ERP vendors. It pays close to the market, a median of 3.1x revenue on the six deals we can price, against 3.4x for private software, mostly in cash with about a tenth of the price deferred. It folds each acquisition into one company under its own name. An owner negotiating with Aptean settles the exit, and any role afterwards, alongside the price.
Aptean is based in Alpharetta, Georgia, and owned by TA Associates, Charlesbank, Insight Partners and Clearlake Capital. Its revenue grew from $298M in 2020 to $804M in 2025, and its group accounts put its spending on acquisitions from 2019 to 2025 at about $2.0bn. In 2025 alone it took Logility, a Nasdaq-listed supply chain planning vendor, private and bought four smaller companies.
Aptean’s UK holding company files audited accounts for the whole group, with what it paid for acquisitions each year, and those accounts, together with releases by Aptean and its owners, supply the spend, financials and terms here. The deal list is ours, built from Mergermarket and Aptean’s releases and accounts.
Aptean Portfolio and Ownership
Aptean sells purpose-built software for manufacturers and distributors: ERP, supply chain planning and execution, manufacturing execution, transport management and process automation, organized by industry. It served more than 10,000 customers in more than 80 countries in 2024, according to its release on the Clearlake investment, and its chief executive is TVN Reddy. It was formed in 2012 from the merger of CDC Software and Consona.
Private equity has owned Aptean throughout the period on this page, and the owners have changed in steps:
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Until April 2019 | Owned by Vista Equity Partners | Group accounts 2019 |
| April 2019 | A new holding company owned by Vista and TA Associates buys Aptean for $750M, funded with $500M of debt and $290M of equity | Group accounts 2019 |
| August 2020 | Charlesbank buys a stake from the existing owners; TA, Vista and Charlesbank share control | Group accounts 2019, subsequent events |
| October 2022 | Insight Partners invests alongside TA, which becomes lead shareholder; Vista exits in full | PrivSource; Mergermarket |
| July 2024 | Clearlake leads a strategic investment, with TA, Insight and Charlesbank remaining | Aptean and Clearlake releases |
The accounts for 2025 name TA Associates, Charlesbank, Insight and Clearlake as the controlling parties. The pace of buying rose after the 2019 recapitalization.
The acquired businesses become part of Aptean itself. Modula, the German ERP group Aptean bought in 2020, now trades as Aptean Germany, and acquired UK companies carry the Aptean name or report as subsidiaries of the group. An owner who sells to Aptean joins a single company whose results consolidate into one balance sheet under one board.
How Many Companies Aptean Acquires
Aptean’s buying picked up after its 2019 recapitalization: 15 acquisitions from 2015 to 2018, with one in 2018, then 44 from 2019 to 2025. The peak came in 2022, with nine, after eight in 2020 and six in 2021, and Aptean bought five companies in each of 2024 and 2025, the second of those years including Logility, its largest acquisition.
Aptean spent about $2.0bn on acquisitions from 2019 to 2025, according to the purchase prices in its accounts, and the cash flow statements confirm the scale: $1.48bn paid for new businesses, net of the cash they held, from 2021 to 2025. Spending dipped to $87M in 2023 and reached $684M in 2025, the year of the Logility take-private.
Acquisitions drive Aptean’s growth: revenue rose by $150M in 2025, and the businesses bought that year contributed $141M of it, according to the accounts. EBITDA reached $172M in 2025, a margin of 21 percent, up from $59M in 2021.
What Size of Company Aptean Buys
Aptean’s group accounts state the price paid at closing, net of the cash in the business, for each of its larger acquisitions, and listed targets publish theirs, which puts a price on 21 of the 59 acquisitions. Across those 21 the median price is $34M, with an interquartile range of $24M to $68M. Four cost $100M or more, and the largest, Logility, was a listed company.
Aptean buys at two scales. Its accounts report the smaller acquisitions only as annual totals, $162M in all from 2019 to 2025, and the priced deals show the larger scale: 14 of the 21 cost $25M or more. At the 3.1x revenue median on this page, a company with $8M to $22M of revenue would sit inside the interquartile range of the priced deals.
What Aptean Buys
The counts on this page cover software companies. Beyond its 59 software acquisitions, our records show 5 more: four IT services firms that implement or resell business applications, and one other business. Our records classify each software acquisition by the industry its customers work in:
| Vertical | Acquisitions |
|---|---|
| Industrial, manufacturing and food production | 17 |
| Supply chain, logistics and transport | 11 |
| Finance, accounting and ERP | 10 |
| Retail, apparel and e-commerce | 5 |
| Other niche verticals | 5 |
| Government and public sector | 4 |
| Healthcare and life sciences | 2 |
| Five other categories, one each | 5 |
| Outside the software count: IT services and other businesses | 5 |
Food and beverage ERP runs deepest, with targets in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and the US that sell to food producers and distributors. Supply chain software covers routing, warehouse management, transport management and, through Logility, planning. Apparel and fashion ERP forms a cluster of its own in North America, and the German, Austrian and Swiss deals cover ERP, manufacturing execution, dealer management and process automation.
The public sector deals belong to an earlier strategy. Aptean bought four public sector software businesses in 2016 and 2017, then in 2018 merged its public sector business with Superion, TriTech and Zuercher to form CentralSquare Technologies, a separate company. Since 2019 Aptean has bought for manufacturers and distributors, and Nucleus Research, an analyst firm, described its recent deals in March 2026 as building supply chain orchestration, consolidating fragmented mid-market manufacturing software in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and adding industry depth.
Where Aptean Buys
Aptean buys across North America and Europe. By country, the United States leads with 21 acquisitions, followed by the United Kingdom with 10, Germany with eight and Canada with six. By region, Europe accounts for 32 of the 59 and North America for 27, across 13 countries.
The balance shifted toward Europe after the 2019 recapitalization. From 2015 to 2018, 14 of Aptean’s 15 acquisitions were in North America; from 2019 to 2025, 31 of 44 were in Europe, starting with Optiware in Denmark and Sanderson in the UK in 2019. Revenue followed the deals: in 2025 the UK generated $137M of Aptean’s revenue and the rest of Europe $240M, together 47 percent of the group, according to its accounts.
What Aptean Pays: Acquisition Multiples
Aptean’s accounts publish what it paid, and company registries and listed targets publish what the businesses earned, so for six acquisitions, a small sample, we can set the price against the target’s revenue.
Across the six, the median is 3.1x revenue. The three private companies, all in the UK, sold for 3.0x to 3.7x revenue, and the three listed companies Aptean took over changed hands at 2.0x to 3.9x. Two of the listed takeovers also give an EBITDA multiple, at 14.6x and 25.0x. The wider private software market sits at a median of 3.4x revenue on 1,028 deals and 13.6x EBITDA on 382 in our valuation research.
As arithmetic, 3.1x revenue equals 15.5x EBITDA at a 20 percent margin and 10.3x at 30 percent, so the same revenue multiple can mean a full price or a modest one for cash flow. Aptean’s own EBITDA margin was 21 percent in 2025.
Aptean pays a market price for a business it wants: the private targets in the set sold close to the median multiple of private software deals.
Aptean funds acquisitions with debt and its owners’ equity. Its accounts describe acquisitions financed through incremental borrowings on a first lien term loan, refinanced in February 2024 at $1.66bn, and on a delayed draw facility upsized by $400M in April 2025, and in 2022 and 2023 through capital contributions from its parent. The 2025 accounts record interest expense of $225M and $345M of undrawn facilities at the year end.
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How Aptean Structures a Deal
Aptean buys whole companies. The stake is stated on 28 of the 59 acquisitions, and on each of them it is 100 percent; Aptean’s accounts describe its acquisitions of 2019 to 2025 as purchases of the whole share capital or, in a 2025 case, of a business’s assets.
Most of the price is paid at closing. Where the accounts state a deferred or contingent amount, it ranged from under 1 percent to 24 percent of the price, with a median of about 10 percent, and where the accounts give the timing, the deferred part fell due in the year after closing. Contingent consideration, the earn-out type, comes to small sums in the accounts, $1.1M at the most, and the three listed takeovers were paid in cash.
For a private company, the negotiation and diligence happen in private and the deal is announced once it closes. The listed takeovers run on a public timetable set by shareholder votes: Logility took ten weeks from signing in January 2025 to closing in April.
A deal with a modest deferred element puts the weight on the fixed terms: the size of the deferred part and what it can be set against, the warranties and indemnities behind the price, and the working capital adjustment, belong in the negotiation alongside the headline number. A private equity platform can offer a different trade, part of the equity rolled into the platform and sold again at its exit, as our guide to selling your business to a software roll-up describes.
What Happens After Closing
Aptean integrates what it buys, and the acquired companies take the Aptean name over time: Modula became Aptean Germany, and UK companies such as Drink-IT’s British arm now carry it. The UK businesses it bought, from Paragon to SSG Insight, file their accounts as Aptean subsidiaries under a guarantee from the parent, and the group consolidates them into one set of results. Nucleus Research wrote that the success of its recent deals depends on integrating the acquired technologies and harmonizing data models and product roadmaps.
Board control passes to Aptean at closing. When it bought 3T Logistics & Technology in November 2023, all five directors of the holding company resigned on 1 November and two Aptean appointees joined the board the same day, and the registered office moved to Aptean’s UK site in Lichfield. Operating leadership can stay: when Aptean bought JobRouter, a German process automation vendor, in December 2024, its co-chief executives said, “As part of Aptean we will continue to invest in our long term growth.” The 2025 accounts record “several management changes in the year to help facilitate the change in direction of the Group”, so the role you take after a sale is a point to settle before signing.
Aptean also sells businesses: in 2018 it put its public sector business into CentralSquare and sold a group of vertical business applications to ESW Capital, which formed Avolin around them, and in 2020 it sold One iota, a UK software business, to its management. Its owners are private equity firms, and Aptean’s own ownership has changed four times since 2019. A business bought today joins a group that reshapes its portfolio and its shareholder base.
Aptean and the Other Software Consolidators
Aptean belongs to the same market as the serial buyers we profile, and it works differently. Constellation Software, described in our profile of Constellation, and Valsoft keep the businesses they buy as separate companies, and Constellation funds its deals from its own cash flow. Aptean combines what it buys into one company, funds deals with debt and private equity capital, and buys larger businesses: its median priced deal, $34M, is about five times the median price in our profile of Valsoft.
Prices differ as well: Valsoft’s private targets in our data sold for about one times revenue, and Aptean’s for about three times. For an owner, that makes Aptean a strong bidder for a business whose product or market it wants.
Is This a Good Time to Sell to Aptean?
Aptean is buying at pace: five acquisitions in 2025, more in 2026, starting with OpsVeda, a US supply chain software vendor, in January, and a fourth private equity owner, Clearlake, since 2024. Its accounts state that it “continues to pursue opportunities to grow through acquisition”, and TA Associates cited the opportunity for strategic acquisitions when Clearlake invested.
The wider software market repriced in early 2026, as AI coding agents raised questions about parts of a sector that, in our view, was already carrying excessive valuations. In our March 2026 webinar on SaaS valuations we noted that the businesses holding up best were smaller, vertically focused and serving mission-critical workflows, and that more buyers now ask how a business is addressing AI disruption risk. Industry ERP and supply chain software for manufacturers matches that description, and Aptean is one of several buyers deploying capital into it.
The case for selling is strongest for a founder with most of their wealth in one software business, who carries that risk alone. If your product runs core operations for manufacturers or distributors in a niche Aptean already serves, or opens a country or industry it wants, the demand is there now. For an owner whose business is growing and who can carry the risk, keeping the company is a good option too. The latest prices are in our software valuation multiples research.
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