March 11, 2024 — 5.00am
, register or subscribe to save articles for later.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
Sydney AI design start-up Relume has knocked back multiple acquisition offers of $25 million to $35 million, its co-founders instead backing themselves to build a company they think can become the next Canva.
Artificial intelligence powers Relume’s platform for designing and building websites, enabling developers to build sitemaps and wireframes by entering just a couple of sentences of text. More than 250,000 websites have been designed and built using Relume and the start-up is firmly in the thick of the AI buzz sweeping the technology sector.
Relume co-founders Adam Mura and Dan Anisse with CTO Daniel Slater.
https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_0.145%2C$multiply_1.545%2C$ratio_1.5%2C$width_756%2C$x_0%2C$y_0/t_crop_custom/q_62%2Cf_auto/e8e18257cb07135abebcd8c6061cf3d5f51dd2d5
Co-founder and CEO Dan Anisse would not reveal where the takeover offers came from but described them as “companies that have an audience interested in what we’re doing, which is a no-code design platform”. The offers, in October and November 2023, were for $25 million and $35 million respectively.
Anisse said knocking back eight-figure bids was not a straightforward or easy decision.
“Most people in the start-up world dream about this. When it gets presented to you, it makes you question, what are you really doing this for?” he said.
“The three of us decided we’ve got so much more that we want to build, and we thoroughly love what we do in terms of our actual jobs.
“And we think the opportunity is 10 times bigger than what we were being offered, considering the team that we’ve got and the space that we’re building in, and the community that we’ve built up. The trend, the team, the customer base, it’s a holy trinity of things that you don’t get often in your life so we decided to knock those offers back.”
‘Most people in the start-up world dream about this.’
Anisse said he spent about a month researching other acquisitions and speaking to other company founders who had gone through a buyout. His co-founder, Adam Mura, and chief technology officer Daniel Slater, a former Canva engineer, agreed on knocking back the deals but friends and family urged deeper consideration.
Relume is bootstrapped, meaning it hasn’t taken any outside investment, and has instead been funded by Anisse, Mura and Slater as its sole shareholders.
“Everyone in my non-tech world was saying, ‘That’s a huge amount of money’, because it is,” Anisse said. “I understood where they were coming from, and I’d probably be telling me that too, to be honest.
“But I think what I learned is that the money starts to fade away. Because you buy your house, and you buy your car, and then it kind of becomes a marginal return of happiness.
“After an acquisition you have to figure out, ‘This is my new role, this is my new job’, and the founders I spoke to often [were] not enjoying that job, even though there was often crazy sums of money involved. So I looked at that risk and thought, ‘No, I’m happy now with what I’m doing and so are the team.’ ”