How bootstrapped husband-and-wife team found the right buyer for their supply chain solution

Husband and wife John Dwinell and Pam Gianetti launched Siena Analytics together in 2013.

“My vision was to create a ‘big data’ solution for supply chain logistics,” Dwinell told Authority Magazine. “At that time, big data hadn’t even been coined as a term!”

Later, in 2016, Siena Analytics became an early adopter of AI, Dwinell told They Got Acquired.

That gave Siena Analytics a competitive edge, attracting some of the largest global logistics companies and big-box retailers. However, it also proved challenging; customers didn’t always understand or trust analytics or AI.

But in the case of Siena Analytics, being ahead of the curve paid off. About nine years after it launched, Dwinell and Gianetti sold the business.

How Siena Analytics met a critical supply chain and logistics need

For more than 16 years, Dwinell was the vice president of emerging technologies at SICK, a manufacturer of sensor-based applications in the industrial sector. Gianetti had spent several years as an environmental health and safety manager at Polaroid before becoming a middle school mathematics teacher.

On a trip together in Siena, Italy, the couple decided to start a software company.

“The easiest part about this rollercoaster is finding your idea,” Dwinell said. “The thing that makes you go, ‘Yes! This is it!’ On the flip side, the challenge is making that dream a reality, and this is where you’re either going to succeed or fail.”

With extensive experience in logistics automation, Dwinell identified a critical need: “There just was no good way to get a complete and accurate understanding of what inventory was in the warehouse, what condition it was in or even where it was located,” he said.

He can remember seeing employees in distribution centers walking up and down the aisles with clipboards to record inventory compliance.

“You don’t need to be a data scientist to know that that is not only inefficient, it’s also highly likely to be impacted by human error,” he said.

Using analytics — then AI — Siena Analytics helped companies and retailers scale manual processes with valuable data “that would otherwise be left on the distribution floor,” its eventual buyer noted. The software integrated into existing hardware, enterprise software and IT infrastructure.

Understanding their vision early — and that it’d likely take time for the market to evolve — Dwinell and Gianetti chose to bootstrap the company.

Already innovative in the space, they invested in AI early (2016) and became a market leader. This, Dwinell told They Got Acquired, was a major step toward growing the company.

Even so, being one of the “firsts” proved difficult.

“Initially analytics and later on AI were not well understood by our customers, causing them to be apprehensive at times,” Dwinell said. “We invested heavily in educating our clients and providing extensive services to help them realize the value of the technology as their internal teams began to better understand how best to leverage it for their operation.”

Early on, Dwinell and Gianetti didn’t heavily invest in marketing, but by partnering so closely with customers, these brands became the biggest supporters of Siena Analytics. In fact, this became one of the most important ways Siena Analytics amplified itself in the industry.

“It was not until much later that we discovered that, despite our size, there were larger partners willing to help elevate our brand because our solution solved a unique problem,” he said. “This allowed us to ‘punch above our weight’ by having our name published alongside other brands that had powerful name recognition.”

At the time of sale in 2022, “our revenue stream showed a healthy balance of recurring revenue, including a growing SaaS business,” Dwinell told They Got Acquired. They had 24 employees, plus contractors.

Finding the right buyer for Siena Analytics

As they approached nearly a decade of running Siena Analytics, Dwinell and Gianetti decided they were ready to look for a buyer.

“We had firmly established ourselves with top-notch reference customers in the primary markets, and post-Covid, the rate of adopting this technology was dramatically increasing,” Dwinell said. “We needed to have a significant sales and marketing team fast. We believed it was the right time to engage a larger partner.”

They worked closely with Consilium Partners, an investment bank, to find the right fit.

“We couldn’t have been more pleased with the investment bank that we chose to work with,” Dwinell said. “We were a great team, and they helped to educate us and follow throughout the entire journey. It was a tremendous effort that I’ll never forget.”

Early on, Dwinell and Gianetti realized selling Siena Analytics would become very stressful at times. The key, Dwinell reflected, was to agree on a strategy and follow through.

“This helped us to ensure we’d never look back and regret our decision,” he said.

Part of that strategy required trusting their team at Consilium Partners and being open with them through each step. They also established what they wanted in a buyer early on, which helped them land on the best decision.

“There are many buyers, each with their own purpose and story,” Dwinell said. “Making the decision about who is the best buyer and what is the best deal is extremely complex. We stuck to the process to help cut through pressures.”

The right buyer was Peak Technologies, a portfolio company of the industrial-focused private equity fund Sole Source Capital. At the time, the acquisition was the 16th investment Sole Source Capital made in the automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) industry and the eighth add-on acquisition for Peak Technologies since Sole Source had acquired the company in 2021, according to the announcement.

“The acquisition of Siena Analytics adds a critical proprietary logistics software solution to the Peak Technologies portfolio that will help customers address visibility and automation issues affecting all supply chain businesses,” the announcement read.

Dwinell couldn’t share specific numbers around the transaction, but he did mention a few factors that helped influence the valuation: “Siena had solid financials that were done to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) standards, which helped prospective investors to see the full detail of the business.”

In addition to a strong gross margin and EBIT, “we were also able to show a solid business plan for the following two years and great prospects for substantial growth beyond that,” he said.

After the sale in June 2022, Dwinell and Gianetti stayed on with Peak Technologies to help with the transition. By the end of 2024, they had “limited involvement.”

His advice for founders looking to sell? “I suggest first starting with understanding as much as possible about the process and then looking for an investment bank to work with that you feel you can trust,” he said. “Be prepared for a lengthy process of working hard. More than anything, be sure that you can do this while ensuring that the company continues to be well run.”