Serg Bell is not your everyday entrepreneur. At 53 years of age, he has some tales to tell: from growing up in Leningrad under the USSR, to founding “a couple dozen” companies and this year selling a majority stake in one of them, Swiss-Singaporean cybersecurity firm Acronis, to EQT at a reported valuation of $4bn.
Acronis, founded in 2003, raised more than $630m in equity financing from the likes of Insight Partners, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, and counts big name companies like GoDaddy, SAP SE and Arsenal Football Club among its customers.
He’s now spending much of his time on Constructor Group, a Schaffhausen, Switzerland-based technical education institution that combines a university, a research centre, businesses, consulting services, incubation and funding, which he launched in 2019.
So, with more than 30 years of entrepreneurship — and one of 2024’s most valuable buyouts in European tech — under his belt, Sifted sat down with Bell to ask what he learnt from the process, and what advice he’d give other entrepreneurs on how to navigate an acquisition.
A years-long process
The first lesson from the Acronis sale is that an acquisition often begins well before you are looking to sell. Bell first met with EQT in 2018 when the firm began the process of acquiring another of his companies — cloud and browser-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) software platform Acumatica, which it finally bought in 2019.
“The same partner at EQT, Johannes Reichel, led the acquisition, and since then Acumatica performed extremely well for them. Since I was already CEO of Acronis, EQT expressed interest in 2019, and again at the end of 2020,” Bell tells Sifted.
While EQT didn’t end up joining investment rounds into Acronis, in December 2023, Bell got back in touch with Reichel to begin discussing potential terms for an acquisition.
And, while the high-level shape of the deal was agreed within a couple of months, followed by a speedy due diligence process, Bell tells Sifted that “aligning internal stakeholders around the complex agreements took considerably longer than expected.”
Use advisors wisely
He says the biggest mistake he made was not to involve long-term advisor Gordon Caplan, the US attorney who served a month in prison in 2019 after pleading guilty to paying $75k to rig his daughter’s college entrance exam results.
“This is the largest transaction we have been part of… His expertise would have streamlined the signing and closing stages, preventing unnecessary delays caused by dozens of stakeholders that were part of Acronis cap table,” Bell tells Sifted. “Such a protracted process distracts executives from core business work on innovation. Never be conservative on your advisors.”
On the other hand, he advises other founders building towards an exit to not “over-rely” on external advice from “well-intentioned and highly experienced, but out-of-context, perspectives”; in other words, from people who don’t really understand your product. He also cautions that investors can often lead companies in risk-averse directions, limiting the potential of the business.
“Investors often prioritise protecting themselves from downside risks, and don’t immediately understand the innovation and differentiation strategies needed to reach the upside,” says Bell. “As a founder, I should have been significantly more persistent and precise in explaining strategic initiatives needed to both minimise risks while optimising returns, but mostly maximising the upside.”
Roots in the USSR
The Acronis founder has come a long way from his days growing up in Leningrad. Bell describes to Sifted how the combination of childhood illness, along with the fall of the Soviet Union, meant he didn’t have what we’d now consider anywhere close to a normal education.
“Life was very much fucked up,” he says. “I was very sick. And then there was, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the breakdown of different educational and government and regulation systems.”
“Because I was a sick child, I was at home a lot and I didn't go to school too much. I was reading a tremendous amount of books. I didn't have a TV, I didn't have a radio, I didn't have a phone,” he says. “I was reading scientific and engineering journals, which were just available because of my parents [both university professors].”
But, despite the challenges, Bell showed early signs of the founder spirit.
“I was always reasonably entrepreneurial,” he says. “Since I was maybe 11, I was trying to build with my hands — fishing equipment, bows and arrows and different toys — which I would exchange with other children because toys weren’t possible to buy in the Soviet Union.”
Then, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Bell remembers the radical change of mindset that was required, as the country began to open up for business.
“It was very messy, because you had to adjust from reading about business as some kind of illegal criminal activity… to the time when business became normal, and so the rules were invented,” he says.
“It was wild. It was a game, but the rules were not fully defined. The processes of doing business were not defined and there was no law.”
In 1993 Bell left Russia and moved to Singapore, and three years later founded the software franchising company Solomon Software, before launching Parallels — the holding company that spun out Acronis — in 2000.
Focusing on education
Now, he’s leading Constructor Group, which builds technology for science and education institutions, an area which he says is still “extremely manual” and in need of digitisation due to a lack of teachers worldwide.
The company has built an “infrastructure platform and set of tools in such ways that this industry can be made efficient and effective,” Bell says, explaining that it comprises a technology company, an investment arm and a standalone university for technical skills.
“You need to make education more efficient, more effective. Otherwise, people will not be able to be educated, and that will drive economies down,” he says. “Poverty, social unrest — there's a lot of problems coming out of a lack of education.”
Constructor Group today employs 250 people in 16 countries, with its software used in 35 countries supporting seven languages. But Bell isn’t stopping there, saying he wants to grow the company “10x bigger.”
And, given where he’s come from and what he’s achieved, it’s hard to bet against him.