Bentley Systems Acquisitions: What It Buys and What It Pays, 2015-2025

Bentley Systems, the listed company behind MicroStation, makes small acquisitions that fill gaps in its portfolio: 38 software acquisitions from 2015 to 2025 in our records, about three and a half a year. Only its two platform deals carry a published price, and both sit well above the private software median. For a specialist engineering application that already plugs into its platform, it pays a full price in cash at closing. It then folds the company into its own structure as quickly as it can, so the deal is a final sale of the business as well as the shares.

Seequent in 2021 and Power Line Systems in 2022 cost about $1.8bn together. Everything else has been small, deals that by Bentley’s own account add about 1 percent a year or less to its recurring revenue. Listed since September 2020, Bentley had $1.5bn of revenue in 2025 and software in use at nearly 42,000 accounts in 189 countries. It ranks ninth among the product-driven strategic buyers of software companies in our ranking.

Bentley’s 10-K filings, its IPO prospectus and its releases give spend and terms. The deal list is ours, from Mergermarket and company filings and releases.

Bentley Systems Subsidiaries and Brands: How Bentley Is Organized

Bentley sells one integrated portfolio, and acquired companies join it as product lines. Its 2025 annual report groups the portfolio into open modeling and simulation applications, Seequent’s subsurface applications, the Bentley Infrastructure Cloud for project delivery and asset operations, Bentley Asset Analytics, and the Cesium and iTwin platform for digital twins. Many acquired product names live on inside those groups:

The company remains under family control. Keith and Barry Bentley founded it in 1984 in Pennsylvania, and Class A shares, which carry 29 votes each, gave their holders about 53.5 percent of the voting power at the end of 2025. Greg Bentley, president since 1996, became executive chair in July 2024, when Nicholas Cumins took over as chief executive, the first from outside the family.

Bentley’s 2020 annual report describes executive management and a Portfolio Development team that identify subject areas and unsolicited candidates, with a proprietary diligence and valuation process. That team sits in a group Bentley calls BSY Investments, which also runs its venture investing.

How Many Companies Bentley Systems Has Acquired

Bentley made 38 software acquisitions from 2015 to 2025. The pace picked up in 2018, with six, and peaked at 11 in 2021, the first full year after the September 2020 listing, when Bentley also paid for Seequent partly in its own shares. Since 2023 it has made seven acquisitions, while the company has put more of its cash into share buybacks: $125.1M in the first half of 2026, against $50.0M a year earlier.

Spend follows the two large deals. Total consideration came to $2.6bn across 2018 to 2025, and the platform acquisitions of 2021 and 2022 account for about $1.8bn of it. In the three years since, Bentley has spent $271.7M on acquisitions, with Cesium the largest. Bentley funds deals from cash flow and its revolving credit facility, and it issued $575M of convertible notes in the month it closed the Seequent deal.

What Size of Company Bentley Buys

Bentley’s filings give the clearest view of size, through what it spends and the recurring revenue its deals add. Programmatic acquisitions cost $300.4M in 2018 to 2020, roughly $215M to $273M in 2021 and 2022 once the two platform deals come out, and $271.7M in 2023 to 2025, lifted by Cesium. That puts Bentley’s programmatic spend at roughly $90M to $135M a year.

By Bentley’s own account these deals add little revenue at first. Its 2025 annual report puts the ARR growth from programmatic acquisitions over the past three years at under 1 percent a year, under about $35M of ARR across the period, and the five years to 2021 at about 1.5 percent a year. Seequent alone added 13 percent to ARR growth in 2021. Bentley says programmatic deals add their value principally by making its platform more comprehensive.

Only the two platform deals have a published enterprise value in our records, so disclosed prices describe the top of the range and say little about the typical target. A founder-led specialist with a few million dollars of recurring revenue sits squarely in Bentley’s programmatic range. Each of the two platform deals brought more than $20M of ARR, and Bentley has bought at that size twice in eleven years.

What Bentley Buys

Beyond its 38 software acquisitions, our records show eight more, all IT services firms: Cohesive Solutions, the IBM Maximo integrator Bentley acquired in 2020 to form The Cohesive Companies, five asset management, rail and construction consultancies that unit bought, an IoT services firm and a Slovak channel partner.

The software rows cover all 38, and the last row adds the IT services firms. Engineering simulation includes structural, electrical, pole and transmission line, water and signage design tools. The subsurface line is the largest: Bentley bought three geotechnical specialists in 2018 and 2019, then Seequent, which had already bought four companies of its own and added three more under Bentley in 2021.

Bentley’s own test: most products it acquires were already interfacing with its platform before the deal, and the purpose is usually to improve their technical and commercial integration. A developer that builds on MicroStation, iTwin or Bentley’s application programming interfaces, and sells to the engineering firms and asset owners Bentley already serves, matches that test. Bentley’s revenue splits 52 percent from engineering and construction firms and 48 percent from owners and operators of infrastructure.

The direction has moved toward operations. Asset analytics, the business built on Blyncsy, Talon and Pointivo, had a revenue run rate of about $50M in January 2026, and Bentley’s chief financial officer described the latest deals as reflecting a capital allocation focus on that line.

Private equity owners sold Bentley both platform companies, and six of the smaller targets came from venture or private equity backers. Others came from a university, a consultancy and an engineering firm.

Where Bentley Buys

Bentley bought in 14 countries. The United States leads with 15, followed by the United Kingdom with 6, Canada with 3, and India, Australia and New Zealand with 2 each; eight countries in continental Europe have one each. By region, North America accounts for 18 of the 38, Europe for 14 and Asia-Pacific for 6.

The countries follow the products. The United Kingdom supplied construction and geotechnical tools, Canada and New Zealand geoscience software, and India a structural design developer and a construction automation team. Bentley sells in 189 countries and earned 47 percent of its 2025 revenue outside the Americas, so the fit of a target’s product with Bentley’s platform outweighs its location.

What Bentley Pays: Acquisition Multiples

Bentley publishes its acquisition spend in aggregate, and the 10-K also reports the ARR each platform deal added. That gives a price to ARR for the large deals and a minimum multiple for the small ones.

For the two platform acquisitions, Bentley paid about $1.75bn in announced prices for roughly $121M of ARR, 14.5 times, using the 13 percent and 2.5 percent boosts to ARR growth that its filings attribute to them. For the programmatic deals of 2023 to 2025, $271.7M of total consideration bought ARR that Bentley puts at under 1 percent of its own ARR a year, which by our arithmetic means more than 7.8 times the ARR acquired. In our valuation research, private software deals sell at a median of 3.4 times revenue, across 1,028 deals.

ARR measures recurring revenue at a point in time, so for a growing subscription business a multiple of ARR runs above a multiple of trailing revenue. Even so, both figures sit well above the private software median, by enough to survive the change of measure.

Deal-level evidence is thin: only the two platform deals carry a published price, both bought from private equity owners, and too few deals carry a usable revenue or EBITDA figure for a median. As arithmetic, at Bentley’s own 2025 adjusted operating margin of 33.4 percent, 14.5 times ARR equals about 43 times EBITDA and 7.8 times equals about 23 times, against 13.8 times across private software deals. The margins of the acquired companies are unknown, so read the bridge as an order of magnitude.

Bentley’s own explanation of these deals points to where the price comes from: programmatic acquisitions, it says, add their value principally by making its platform more comprehensive. A geotechnical or simulation tool sold through Bentley’s account managers and its E365 subscription reaches accounts in 189 countries, and a seller who can show what the product would earn there argues from Bentley’s own logic.

How Bentley Structures a Deal

Bentley buys whole companies and pays at closing. From 2023 to 2025, cash at closing made up 99.8 percent of the $271.7M of total consideration, and contingent consideration was zero in each of those years. Earlier deals carried small contingent payments, $4.5M in 2021 and $1.4M in 2022, and one 2018 acquisition had a revenue-based earn-out whose 2018 targets were met.

Part of the price waits in escrow. Of the cash paid in 2025, $9.5M sat in an escrow account at year end to secure indemnification and other obligations of the sellers, and $11.0M did at the end of 2024. Plan for an escrow alongside the warranty package.

The incentive for the team comes separately. Bentley pays cash-settled retention incentives to key employees of acquired companies and books them as acquisition expenses, apart from the purchase price. In the Seequent deal, part of the shares issued to sellers was subject to forfeiture if post-closing employment conditions were unmet. For a founder, the retention package is where the second part of the money sits, so its size, its conditions and its leaver terms deserve as much attention as the headline price.

Bentley has paid in shares once since its listing: Seequent’s sellers took 3.1 million Bentley shares, worth $182.4M, alongside cash. For a programmatic deal, plan on cash. Private equity platforms offer a different trade, with 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

Bentley’s annual report states a general practice of fully assimilating acquired companies’ functions into its global functional structure as quickly as possible, with a dedicated integration team. The acquired product becomes part of the portfolio that Bentley’s E365 subscription opens to its enterprise accounts.

Platform deals get a lighter touch. Bentley says it may onboard a platform acquisition in a way that protects its independent momentum, and Seequent still runs its own product family and buys companies under its own name: it added three in 2021 and a geothermal simulation developer in 2023.

Product names often outlast the company. PLAXIS, SYNCHRO, LEGION, ADINA, SPIDA, PLS and Cesium all appear as product names in Bentley’s 2025 annual report, while other acquired software now runs under Bentley names, such as OpenGround for geotechnical data and iTwin Capture for reality modeling. If the brand matters to your customers, negotiate its future before signing.

Bentley says many of its current executives are former founders or executives of companies it acquired, and it describes talent mobility for key staff. Bentley also sells what falls outside its focus: in September 2026 it agreed to sell The Cohesive Companies, its Maximo consulting arm, to Naviam, keeping a minority stake and a board seat in the combined business.

Each Portfolio Prices the Fit: Bentley Against Autodesk and Trimble

In our view Bentley is the buyer with the widest reach across infrastructure engineering applications, and its acquisitions are designed to make that portfolio more complete. Its 10-K names Autodesk, Trimble, Hexagon and Nemetschek as its main rivals in public works and buildings, and Hexagon, AVEVA and Dassault Systemes in resources and industrial applications. Several of them buy engineering software companies of their own, and Hexagon ranks above Bentley in our ranking of software acquirers.

That competition is useful to a seller. A geotechnical, simulation or construction tool can fit more than one of these portfolios, and each buyer prices the fit through its own channel. Private equity platforms in construction and engineering software add a buyer that pays for the business as it stands today.

With the Bentley family holding a majority of the votes, the company sets its own pace: it pays a quarterly dividend, buys back shares and has acquired seven companies since 2023. Its stated priorities are digital twins, AI and asset analytics.

Is This a Good Time to Sell to Bentley Systems?

Bentley is buying at a slower pace and with a narrower focus. Its 2025 purchases, Talon Aerolytics and the technology assets of Pointivo, were in asset analytics, the deal it announced in September 2026 was a sale, and its buybacks have risen. ARR still grew 12 percent in the year to June 2026, to $1,536.0M, and its chief financial officer says Bentley keeps the flexibility to fund programmatic acquisitions.

The wider software market repriced in early 2026, as AI coding agents cast doubt on parts of a sector that we saw as 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. Engineering simulation and geotechnical software fits that description: its results feed designs that engineers must certify, which favors validated methods. Bentley’s chief executive reported progress with infrastructure AI in August 2026.

The case for selling is strongest, we think, for a founder whose product already runs alongside Bentley’s software and whose growth depends on distribution it lacks. If that is your company, Bentley can pay for what the product will do in its channel, and it pays in cash. If your product is exposed to AI disruption, our webinar view stands: now is a good time to sell, while valuations for software businesses remain sensible. For an owner who is growing well and values independence, keeping the company is a good option too. The latest prices are in our software valuation multiples research.

About Aventis Advisors

Aventis Advisors is an M&A advisor for technology and IT companies with an enterprise value of €5M to €100M. We run global competitive sale processes, drawing on a database of 300,000 financial and strategic investors, so you choose between the best offers for your company. We take on a limited number of mandates each year.

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